With Google turning 9 today and still being the search engine for most everyone on the planet, it's only natural the other big dogs are going to try to bump them off and take-over. The newest bid in this effort is Microsoft and the overhaul of their Live Search site, www.live.com.

Live is hyping its search results as a "blended search" where Microsoft attempts to anticipate what its users want. An example used is the search term 'digital camera' with the first results being a sort of product guide of camera models and their reviews taken from the usual suspects Amazon.com and PriceGrabber.com. These show up in the sponsored sites category which most everyone immediately ignores, much like the advertisement pages in magazines that are layed out to look like real articles.

The links that follow the sponsored results look like what you would find at Google. Almost exactly. See the screenshots below.





Sure the presentation and look is different, but that's probably not going to sway users to switch from their favorite Google giant. Apparently, however Microsoft is going to use this "blended search" model for searches associated with products, local businesses, health information and entertainment in the coming month. Wow. That is not very exciting.

As James Carville might put it, "It's about the search results, stupid." If anyone is going to take aim at Google, they are going to have to do better than stabs at incremental innovation.

Mahalo on the other hand, has something new and different. See Mahalo's screenshot below of the search term 'digital camera.' Note there is no suggested sponsor link box - a nice and welcome nod to our intelligence. And they make the results so easy to sift through so we can find exactly what we want. Not to mention the layout is significantly different and completely intuitive. So, which search engine would you rather use? Take our poll.





Update: As you can see from this review, I was surprised that a "new site" looked so blah and boring. Two of our readers (Thanks Craig and Ervanesque!) noticed that the screenshot was of the old site. The reason the site looks old and dry to me is because it is! It's the same site, The new Live.com hasn't been loading most of the time. So depending on when you go to the site, sometimes the new one will load, sometimes the old. Kind of like a moving target. Yes, it's still in beta, but c'mon!

Anyway, here's a screenshot of the New site. Yes, it's different, but it's still not very good.




At the time of writing this update, clicking on one of the camera links gets you an error message.



So, in sum, the new overhaul has some kinks and bugs to work out before it's ready for prime time.



[via the New York Times]