For a while already I have setup live.com as my homepage in my browsers. I’ve added my most important feeds on to the homepage to see at a glance what’s going on online.

For search I used google.com until I started to use live.com. From that moment I switched to the live.com search. It’s maybe not as fast as google.com regarding the interface, but it’s nice. I like the features it offers. Take for instance this small goodie I found out about the other day while watching a presentation from David Boschmans.

Search for something, I’ll the same example that he used, “Dan Brown”. By default the results are shown in a list of results which some info about the site and page. Notice the horizontal scrollbar just above the big vertical one.

It’s probably set to the center. If you move it to the right, you can more info about the current results. Instantly updated (it uses Ajax for that). Now below every page it found there is a small line in gray text that says: Search within this site.

If you click on it it changes to an input field.

Enter some search criteria, press enter, and you will search for that text -in- that specific site. Useful. You can do it in Google by including a site:url in the search field, but this one is just a bit smoother I think.

That same horizontal scroll bar is also available on the images tab of Live.com. It will resize the images on the fly. Nice.