Live Search completely broken? | The Coffeehouse

Escamillo

Has anyone else foun that Live Search has been completely broken for the last few days? Frequently the search resuts are just a blank page; or at times only found images are shown,; or zero results are found (wrongly) so a list of suggested searches is given, and clicking any one of these just delivers a blank page?

This has happened for me for days now, with IE. Firefox, and Chrome, using live.com, MSN toolbar, search box of the various browsers, etc.

For example,
I just now did a search for 'venus williams' (unquoted) and get a blank page all the time.
If I search for "venus williams" I get two 'news' links but nothing else.

The problem seems to only affect "Web" search. News, Images, and Video search appear to work fine.

The problem doesn't appear all the time. I just now did one more web search for "venus williams" and got actual results.

magicalclick

Only you. Mine is always fine and I just tested it. Meaning you may have got a virus. My bro got a virus that change Google, Live, and other search result of the link. It looks fine, but they are point to some junk sites.

Escamillo

In reply to magicalclick

#Mar 13th @ 1:47 PM

I don't think it's a virus. All my computers are showing this behavior, and I have virus protection.
Whatever. I switched all my search engines to Yahoo and Google. I don't have time to track down Microsoft's screw-ups.

Edit:
OK, I couldn't resist trying to track this down. Smiley

In my investigation, I did searches from live.com, msn.com, IE search box, and MSN toolbar. I thought that I discovered that searches from MSN.com worked, but from Live.com didn't. And searches from IE's search box failed, while MSN toolbar mostly failed. And the search query URL for each of these things is slightly different. But I eventually came to the conclusion that it's random as to whether it works or not.

Oh well. I'll check this again in a month or so, and if it's fixed I might switch back to Microsoft's search.

zyphlar
Your friendly neighborhood IT Ninja!

Not just you, Esca. Been using the Windows 7 beta (the only computer I haven't installed Chrome on yet) and I would describe Live search as "useless." Being a web dev myself, and having played for a couple seconds with it, I'd guess that there's an intermittent problem where certain inputs to Live (like os version maybe?) result in a blank page and/or zero search results. Or maybe the service is just screwed.

Either way there's no convenient method to report this and Live/MSN search really blows, so c'est la vie and good luck to them.

*Let me qualify "really blows" in interests of fairness: when Google produces the requested information from your site, but your own proprietary search engine & website navigation fail at delivering the requested information despite 10 minutes of concentrated searching, your technology "really blows" compared to Google's.

joechung

I've noticed that Live Search results empty pages on queries. That's pretty awful. Sporadic problem but easy to reproduce if you try enough queries.

GoddersUK
I CAN has cheezburger and you CAN'T has stop me!

In reply to joechung

#Mar 14th @ 3:31 PM

Plainly not easy to repro as I use it as my main search engine and (touch wood) have NEVER experienced this,

netrabbit

Yes it is broken for me on many of the computers. It is really frustrating. The live search does not even have much market share and now this ..Wake up Live Search.