It seems the 26th of September we can expect a new Windows Live Search, Live Search 2.0

Mary Jo Foley blogs about it, but also the person behind Mini-Microsoft and the people over at LiveSide

Some features that can be expected:

• New personalization capabilities integrated into Live Search
• An integrated location/calendar/presence service that may also tie in with Live Search 2.0
• A new capability integrating social networks, annotation (ratings and reviews) and search
• Future integration between Outlook and Live Search

Sean blogs over at the MSDN blogs about relevance:

“I am a big fan of the Live folks, who happen to have the most responsive team on internal discussion lists.  Whenever an employee pings the list with When I query for <whatever> on Live, the result I need is number 4 on the results page, while Google or Yahoo have it as number 1 or 2, someone on the team comes right back with an explanation for the existing result, and a description of what changes they are making to increase the relevancy for that search in the upcoming release.  My personal opinion is that search is something we are getting ready to get very very right”

2 things:

1. If Google or Yahoo has a result on page 1 or 2, is this a result that’s not manipulated? It’ seems it is a result we trust. It seems the whole page is a resultset we trust. But is it the truth, is it manipulated by SEM’s?

2. You can have a fantastic search engine, but if people trust the results of another search engine it’s hard to convince them that your results are better. Although I have to say, with relevance it’s quite easy to convince them. These are not simply other search results, these are other but more relevant search results.