If you’re more into politics than sports, you may prefer doing a search for “obama” instead. Now that search will include video clips from MSN from Obama’s First 100 Days event.

You can access Live Search from any web-enabled mobile phone by going to m.live.com.

Since the company was acquired by Microsoft a couple of years ago, it’s no surprise that the application will be more deeply integrated into the new 6.5 software than your typical pre-installed application would be. It also will exclusively use Live Search as its search provider and those searches will be able to tap into the phone’s GPS if available. If the phone doesn’t have GPS, it will use cell tower triangulation for searches that require localization – like weather queries or movie listings.

The application is available now to manufacturers that want to load it onto Windows Mobile 6.5 phones. Later this fall, it will be made available as a standalone application for download in the Windows Mobile Marketplace.

(via CNET)

Have you ever wondered how we make our decisions?  What we do to optimize speed and efficiency?  Who do we test our ideas on?  What the heck is the “Golden Triangle?”

These answers and more in this chat with Venkat… so dive in.

• What is my carbon footprint?

• What hybrid car is best?

• Where can I find stylish reusable shopping bags?

• How do I kitchen compost?

You might be surprised to find out it’s not as hard as thought.

In addition to the new site, the team says they’ve also improved site performance and relevance now that they’ve ported the sites away from legacy technology and over to the Live Search platform.

When browsing the site, you’ll see reviews and “Opinion Rankings” on the product pages. These “opinion rankings” are generated automatically by crawling the web for reviews to provide ratings on the product’s various features like ease of use, size, speed, etc.

Stefan and I sat down with Martin, a Senior Product Manager on the Search team, to find out the process for improving search and where things may be trending.  An interesting discussion with the slickest sticky-note you’ve seen today .

We had a high-level discussion about the 2nd Pillar in project “Silk Road”: the Live Search API 2.0.  This is the very same back end used for some little known websites… like Facebook, heard of it?

We’ll circle back to Pillars 1 and 3 in future sessions, so stay tuned and keep on rockin’.

For comparison purposes, I ran the same query for the same airline/flight combination on that other search engine and came up with similar, but less detailed results.

Live Search:

Google:

Guess what I'll be using for flight tracking now!

The idea behind Viveri is for Microsoft to have a place where new concepts can be tested and users can provide feedback directly to search engineers. Think of it as sort of a “Search Labs” type of venture.

At the recent Tech Fest event, attendees got to see Viveri in action. One example of a feature that Vivieri users will soon be testing was a world cloud of additional queries related to the search terms entered. Another feature showed results from niche search engines appearing next to the main results in separate modules. For example, a product search returned results from Amazon and a health-related search brought up a WebMD module.

The Feature I Want: The Real-Time Web

That “module” concept immediately made me think how useful a side module of Twitter results could be if implemented. Imagine searching for something on the web and seeing real-time results from Twitter appear to the right of the traditional web results. The real-time results would have to refresh of course, like they do on search.twitter.com, in order to be truly useful. Or even better (perhaps), what if the side module could contain updates from Facebook’s Live Feed?

Everybody’sbeen saying lately how an engine that searched the real-time web could be the big “Google killer.” I think that’s a bit optimistic – changing ingrained habits tends to be a much slower process. However, that said, I could definitely see myself, as an early adopter, migrating to a search engine that integrated the real-time web results with the static ones. Heck, I’d probably switch today if one became available.

Even if you’re a “Twitter hater,” (and frankly, I don’t get you people – don’t dare call yourself a techie, OK?), there’s something  that’s just truly incredible about being able to tune into the thoughts of millions of people as opposed to just seeing a list of relevant web pages.

Perhaps this is on my mind today because I watched Obama’s speech last night while hitting “refresh” on search.twitter.com for a live (and often amusing) backchannel. A backchannel which included people from around the world watching their TV sets, yes, but it also included other politicians, staffers, and White House press correspondents. Since when did you ever have access to that type of transparency?

If that real time web of information could be mashed up into a normal web search engine, I could definitely see the beginnings of a search revolution taking place.

But perhaps I’m just getting ahead of myself here. The demonstrators at Tech Fest made no mention of anything like this. But could someone please pass along my idea? Thanks. 

You can read more about Viveri and check out a screenshot over on TechFlash.

The new Live Search command now available lets you instantly get search results from Live.com by typing the word “live” before your query. For example, type “live sean penn” to get Live Search results for Sean Penn. You can also type “live images sean penn” to get a list of images or “live xrank sean penn” to get Sean Penn’s xRank answer. The Powerset team said it was really simple to do this thanks to the new JSON API offered by Live Search.

If you don’t know what Ubiquity is all about, here’s a video that demonstrates the Live Search results in action.

One of the most helpful new features is predictive query input, which helps you by suggesting commonly typed in words and phrases when you’re entering in text in the search box.

This feature displays after only entering in a couple of letters. It also remembers what you have entered in before, so for example, if you’re constantly looking for the nearest sushi restaurant or Starbucks (I know I am!), those terms will be always be handy in the drop-down list.

Another big improvement to the app is the integration of the “Bird’s Eye” view in the mapping part of the application. This additional view gives you a 3D-like perspective of an area – not just looking down on the tops of buildings as you do in traditional aerial views, but seeing them at sort of an angle – as a bird would. This makes it a lot easier to navigate to new areas since you can see more detail.

For all phones, whether GPS-enabled or not, an improved “Locate Me” feature now offers improved accuracy. This feature is great - especially when you’re lost - for finding your exact (or nearby) location on the map.

As always, Live Search Mobile still provides quick access to directions, traffic information, movie listings, gas prices, and web searches. To download the updated client, navigate to http://wls.live.com from your phone’s browser to get started.

Because of the economy, demand for travel decreased in 2008 and he believes this will continue in 2009, which will lead airlines to lower their prices in order to fill seats. Assuming oil prices stay low in 2009 (he thinks they will), airlines will pull back on surcharges which will also allow fares to drop. Finally, he sees capacity remaining flat in 2009. All this leads to his belief that 2009 will be a good year for those looking to travel, particularly in the winter and spring months.

Says Mike, “airlines and hotels are going to have to convince people to spend money on travel, which could mean a lot of deals and sales. I think there will be a lot of tinkering with fares as airlines try to find the right mix and that will lead to a lot of price movements.” In other words, there may be deals, but you’ll have to be quick in order to catch them.

One way to stay updated on those elusive deals is, of course, to use Farecast. With Farecast Alerts, you can grab a deal the second prices drop. You may also wanted to keep the Farecast Deals page bookmarked so you can keep an eye on the deals in your market.

As you may know from prior experience, when you search for an image, not all the images are really what you were looking for. You’re presented with a variety of images, but it’s often easier use your eyes to hone in on the image you need than it is to structure a search query that does that for you. 

So for example, let’s say I’m looking for an image of a daisy, the flower, that is. Since I only entered the word “daisy” into my search query, my image search results include not only daisies (the flower), but also Daisy Duck, and some girl named Daisy, too.

Because I wanted to see just an image of the daisy flower – the white one, by itself, and not in a bunch, I click “Show Similar Images” on the item that most closely resembles the image I wanted.

Now look! My search results are filled with matches to the image I had originally wanted in the first place and all I had to do was click.

That’s amazingly useful.

- Image Search: Bellagio Las Vegas
- Farecast: Flights from SEA to LAS
- Product Search: Canon Digital Camera

To use the new feature, look for eBay product ads marked with the cashback icon (gold coin) and the words “Live Search Cashback.” Click through on the ad to make your purchase on the eBay site. After completing your purchase with PayPal, you’ll get a message that you’re now eligible for instant cashback. The amount displayed is then instantly and automatically deposited into your PayPal account so you can continue your online shopping.  

By the way, if anyone was hit by the Black Friday Cashback glitch which caused some shoppers to not receive their promised 40% discount on HP’s deal, you can contact customer support through this site to have your Cashback accounts properly credited.

In the Quick Add bar, you’ll see the options: Maps, Restaurants, Movie times, Images, Videos, and Business listings. If you’re composing a message where you needed to include one of these types of things – say, for example, directions to a party, the restaurant you’re suggesting for dinner, the photo of the gadget you’ve been lusting after, etc. – you can easily add them directly into your message with ease.

After clicking your choice from the list, you’re presented with a search box which allows you to query the Live.com engine. The results appear right in the sidebar and underneath each one is an option to add the item to your email. Simply click on the word “Insert” and the map, restaurant, photo, etc. will automatically be added to your email.

First I inserted the restaurant info…

Then I inserted the map!

That’s a pretty great feature, if I do say so myself. Thanks for the tip, Jamie!

Like all Live.com search verticals, the video search site uses the unique “smart-motion preview” feature which lets you preview videos right on the page by clicking on the thumbnail that displays instead of navigating away to another page.

So what kind of videos will you find at the new Live Video search? How about newest The Office, Family Guy, Arrested Development, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, Bones, or Heroes. There are older shows like Dragnet, too.

Note: this update affects U.S. customers only.

After you enter in a search query in the box provided, you’ll be taken to a search results page where you’ll be informed as to whether your search was a winner or not. With the holiday season right around the corner, it’s a great time to try this out because - who knows? – you might just win some cash to go shopping with!

Heck yeah, Live.com just became my eBay search engine. The fine print to this deal isn’t all that complicated either – the only requirement is that you pay via PayPal, which I think most eBay’ers do anyway, right? 

However, please not that you can only receive up to $200 cash back from the Live.com folks, so keep that in mind when you go to purchase that small island you were looking at.

What’s really exciting, though, is that this is only the first step involving the integration of Live Search and Facebook, according to Agnus Norton, Senior Director, Live Search Product Management: “As we evaluate user feedback and results we'll explore additional ways to integrate Live Search more deeply into the Facebook experience.”

What do you think of the Live Search integration? You can communicate to the team directly on, where else? – their Facebook page.