Now U Can Rank Live Search Results

27th October 2008

Microsoft is in the process of allowing its users to share their opinions about the search results provided by Live Search.

Users will now be able to add, delete and rearrange the order of the search results they receive through Microsoft as per their requirements, through a Windows Live ID, which they will first have to sign up for if they don’t already have one. Users can also add photos, videos and new pages to the results.

All this will be possible through a new experimental search engine, being introduced by Microsoft, which has been named U Rank.

As users will be quick to point out, this is not a new idea. Both Google and Yahoo! already offer similar facilities. What is new here is the ability to share these changes, with ones friends and contacts if these changes are made while sharing is on. The friends in turn can make further changes if they desire to do so.

However if a user does not wish to publicise the changes he has made, he can go to his history page and make the required edits there. Thus the privacy concerns of clients have been taken care of.

At present this facility has been made available only to a limited extent, but if it is successful, Microsoft may expand it, to be a part of Live Search. It is also possible that the results which have been reordered on U Rank may be visible to other interested users, who are not on the friends list, at a later stage.

This process is of course not as quick or easy as it may sound, as Search results take a while to get loaded, and Microsoft still has to sort out some basic user interface problems they are facing. For instance, it is presently not possible to change the ranking of search results from one page to another. Even the drag and drop method is not very effective.

All said and done however, at the end of the day, this effort by Microsoft will allow customers to offer constructive criticism to their search results, and as such the attempt should be appreciated.

Tags: microsoft, seo

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Google Launches WikiSearch, Allows Users To Customise Results | AccuraCast Search Daily News : 25 November 2008 at 11:58 am

[...] This is the first time Google will allow its users to alter the search results, but Microsoft has already introduced a similar service on an experimental basis called U Rank, while Mahalo also provides results which have been created by users. [...]

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