MSN Search Continues to Fall Short With New and Not So Improved UI
MSN released a new UI for their search engine today. I think it looks a hell of a lot better than the UI we’ve been looking at for a long time now but it still falls way short.
Greg Boser complains about not being able to see the search box but in my version of Firefox it is clearly visible. I totally agree with him about the annoyance of no OnFocus on the search input field. Even worse, when I type a search in the search field and instinctively hit the carriage return key (rather than mousing to click the search button) I don’t get whisked away to the SERP’s. No! I get a stupid javascript dropdown for “web”, “news”, “images”, etc. I guess it depends which version of Firefox you are running because on my home machine, carriage return does result in submitting the form.
Bottom line: I continue to be disappointed in Microsoft search. You would think a company with the budget the size of a small country would do more testing and could be more innovative. A year ago when the first MSN search ads began running in the UK I thought to myself “Now we’re going to see the full blunt force of the Microsoft war chest come down hard on the Google empire”. Now I’m wondering if Microsoft may be so big that they’ll slowly die in the face of smarter, quicker and more innovative competitors.
