Microsoft updates its search engine for news

Microsoft has rolled out a new improved news search engine under its Live Search banner. Overall Live Search News looks a lot like you’d expect a news search engine to look if you’ve used another one like say, Google News. But there are a few features that make Live Search News stand out:

• An orange banner will pop up and highlight breaking news at the top of the site, but only when there’s actual breaking news, which is kind of refreshing in today’s 24/7 news environment when many news agencies are pretending there’s always something breaking.
• See that blue sidebar on the right? Yeah, we thought it was for advertising at first too, but it’s actually local news selected for you based on your IP address. No need to sign up and change your settings to get local news tailored to you.
• Once you enter a search term, you can further refine your search from a list of categories, or select from a list of related searches.
• Videos are featured right on the main page, and if you mouse over them you can preview the videos before deciding whether to click to watch the full video.

Overall, we’re pretty impressed with the new Live Search News. Our only real complaint is that there doesn’t appear to be a way to subscribe to RSS feeds for searches.

[via CNet]