Stone Studio

Life Search goal story: Browsing a trade magazine, Reta has just spotted the “Curiously Costly” line of shoes, and declared them a “must-have” for the upcoming season. She heads over to her favourite wholesaler’s website and sees an empty search form, with an assortment of products underneath it and a message, “50,000+ items”. First, she selects “shoes” from a dropdown and watches as the products below morph into a collection of shoes, and the message is now “8,000+ shoes”. Then, she begins typing. As she types “C”, she now sees all the shoes beginning with “C”. This continues until the search field contains “curio”, at which point only three products are shown below. One of those is “Curiously Costly”, which is what Reta clicks on to successfully conclude the search.As the user refines their search query, continuously show all valid results. The search query is a combination of controls that let the user narrow down the collection of all items. It may be a straightforward text field, or a complex arrangement of Sliders, radiobuttons, and other controls. The results appear in a separate region and are continuously synchronised with the query that’s been specified.

Yet, it is not new idea. Yahoo’s AllTheWeb LiveSearch launched in 2006 as a beta was as fast and probably better. Yahoo would have liked to release it to the mass public, but it is very hard to show ads in live search so I guess it didn’t make economic sense?

Meet the Real Live Search

The app was built by developer Long Zheng. In his blog post describing the app, he says that it was built in a few hours and may be prone to bugs (don’t be surprised if increased traffic to the site slows it down for a while).

It’s a seach engine that displays results almost immediately after you type each character in a query. For example, if I was to run a query for “TechCrunch”, it would rapidly display results for “T”, “Te”, “Tec”, and so on as I typed out each letter. It’s flashy, fun, and even useful (sometimes).

The search engine shows results for images, video, and text, as well as related searches. In my testing I found that the app was helpful sometimes, especially for quick image searches, but for the most part this is a fun diversion more than anything — there aren’t too many search queries that yield good results when you’ve only entered half of a word.

It’s a reminder that Bing has a solid set of APIs available, though there hasn’t been much attention paid to them recently. Bing is notable for having a less restrictive API than Google — Bing lets you reorder results from the web, while Google does not (Yahoo’s BOSS also gives developers quite a bit of freedom).

In the Bing developer center says:

Bing API 2.0
A key part of Project Silk Road is a re-architected Bing API that offers open, flexible options for building or enhancing your site or applications. Developing an application with the new API is straightforward: Choose a SourceType (or SourceTypes – you’re not limited to one), choose an output protocol (JSON, SOAP, or XML) and then customize according to your needs. All you need to get going is an AppID.
Key improvements to the Bing API include:

Multiple protocols: JSON, XML, SOAP
Multiple SourceTypes: Web, Images, InstantAnswer, Phonebook, RelatedSearch, Spell, and more…
Unlimited use for customer-facing sites and applications
Flexible presentation options: No restrictions on ordering and blending results

Reference:
Ajax Portal and Book Homeage
Live Search in Wikipedia
About Bing Live Services
Bing Developer Center