• Live Search , Monday, August 4, 2008 12:45 PM

Microsoft has upgraded the Live Search homepage, featuring high-quality photographs as background images and "hotspots" that highlight specific sections that get moused-over. According to Chris Rayner and Zack Gutt, Live Search senior product and senior program managers, respectively, the team tested the enhancements with a select group of users before rolling them out full scale.

"Our goal for the home page is to find the best way to enhance users' sense of discovery, surprise, and delight while balancing engineering realities for a great user experience," Rayner and Gutt said. "We want the page to be a great place to start a search and also to intrigue and inform as well. We think hotspots will help users discover parts of Live Search they might not know while not distracting from the core purpose of the page--searching."

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