Windows Live Desktop Mail, a free downloadable mail client from Microsoft that's currently in beta testing, has incorporated a feature that integrates Web search into the e-mail service, the company
announced Thursday.
"The goal with Active Search is to bridge the gap between the users inbox and the Web at large," said Aly Valli, Microsoft's product manager for Windows Live
Monetization. "We've tried to bring the two together with active search. We know consumers have a lot of things they want to search for in their inbox, and we wanted to tighten up that experience a
bit."
Active Search consists of two main components--an integrated search bar that allows users to access MSN search directly from the mail client, and a sidebar that displays search results.
When the user hasn't entered a keyword into the search bar, Active Search populates the search results sidebar with terms from keywords culled from the e-mail currently being viewed.
Active
Search helps monetize the Live Desktop Mail application by inserting sponsored listings into the search results sidebar. If the user has entered a search term, the results come from MSN adCenter's
keyword ad marketplace, and if the user has yet to enter a keyword, the ads come from Kanoodle's contextual network--although Kanoodle's results are planned to be replaced by contextual results from
MSN's own network in the future.
Active Search can be turned off as well, replacing the sidebar with a simple graphical banner ad, taken from the MSN network's stable of ad clients.