As a few of you have noticed (here, here, here and others) live.com is officially out of Beta!

 

We officially released our V1 a couple of days ago. We've been catching up on sleep the past few days and forgot to hit the publish button for our blog entry :) As of a few minutes ago our last piece of rollout is underway and http://search.msn.com has begun to redirect to Live Search.

 

We have come a long way together, since our release on 11/1/05. We owe our many revisions and improvements to your feedback... check out the pictures to see how far we've come (11/1, 3/7, 3/30, 6/15 and 9/12).

 

 So what's next? some more sleep, a ship party... oh and a ton of cool features we have planned!

 

 

Last night we released an update. The key focus of this release has been quality and addressing our top customer pain points, not new features... we've fixed hundreds of bugs, so it's not reasonable to enumerate all of them :) Here are some of the most significant improvements:

 

We have done a lot of work around responsiveness; interacting with the app, clicking on different pages, rss rendering, navigating away from live.com and memory leaks have all been significantly improved.

 

Let's start with some definitions:

Anonymous - users that have never signed in

Identified - users that have signed in at least once, but are currently not signed in

Anonymous users are now prompted to sign in after a certain number of changes enabling them to roam their settings.

For identified users, we now better protect user data from unauthorized changes. Users can view their data without signing in, but will need to sign in to make changes.

 

First, the page is much faster. The search box is wider and we're including messaging for key new features. You'll also notice that the Jewel (the drop down in the upper left hand corner) is now available on this page.

 

Our partner teams have built some very cool new gadgets that are now included in our directory. Some include:

- Windows Live Expo: look for listings on Expo using this gadget (click here to add it)

- Team scores & news by FOX: keep track of your favorite team scores and news (click here to add it)

- Auto listings: looking for car? find it using the MSN Auto listings gadget (click here to add it)

 

live.com is now accessible including screen reader mode which can be enabled via the 'Options' dialog.

 

many many other bug fixes and under hood changes to improve robustness and reliability.

 

Enjoy! let us know what you think.

 

As some of you may have noticed, we switched over to a brand new faster search results experience yesterday...  All the improvements were driven by your feedback!

 

Read more details on the search experience here. Search away and let us know what you think!