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Do you search on Live.com?

I was wondering about this. We have what i think is a cool feature on www.live.com, where we don't steal focus but we still let users type in the search box without clicking on the box first. If you start typing in the address bar, we don't steal focus to the search box as a lot of sites do. How many of you use that feature? Do you like it?

- Venkat

Published Monday, November 21, 2005 6:35 PM by venkatna

Filed under: MSN

Comments

# re: Do you search on Live.com? @ Tuesday, November 22, 2005 1:14 AM

It is a cool feature. A couple of things I don't like (sorry). If you click a result and the results are displayed, when you click the browser's back button, the search results are gone. Have to search again.

One more thing, and this is a bug. In Firefox, if you search for something that has multiple pages of results, if you click the next page link, you get a 404 error. This only occurs with Firefox.

John Walker

# re: Do you search on Live.com? @ Tuesday, November 22, 2005 5:02 AM

that is pretty neat - although, how is it functionally different than actually focusing on the search box?

i've got to put another vote to fix john's bug, though, it's a real pain-point.

other than that, though, i recently set live.com to my home page (trumping google news' 1-year reign), and I must say I'm quite satisfied with the change. The fact that we include Google News as a news widget is convenient as well :-)! Great work, guys!

abanker

# re: Do you search on Live.com? @ Tuesday, November 22, 2005 12:33 PM

John:
Both bugs are on our must fix list. The search experience really does suck. We hope to fix it really soon.

Arjun:
Most websites set focus on the search box. If you have that page set as your homepage, and you start typing on the address bar as soon as you open the browser, your focus goes from the address bar to the search bar. This is not the greatest behavior. That does not happen on live.com which is why i think it is cool.

venkatna

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