Microsoft Live Search

» see search.live.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

by 2006 i was a google user, and live search was the brand that did not stop me from being a google user. i had moved off altavista some time around 2001 and settled on google by university. microsoft's search engine never made it onto my list of things to try after that. live search was a thing you saw as the default in internet explorer if you had not changed it, which on most pcs in turkish internet cafes meant it was the search engine running quietly under msn.com.

the brand had a confusing biography even at the time. msn search ran from 1998 to 2006 as the default microsoft web search, using third-party indexes for most of that period and a microsoft-built crawler from 2005. on 11 september 2006 microsoft replaced it with windows live search, part of the wider windows live family that also included windows live messenger and windows live mail. on 21 march 2007 the windows prefix was dropped, and the product became simply live search, with an adcenter ad system grafted on. on 3 june 2009 it was rebranded bing.

the rebrand was treated by tech press at the time as a death and a resurrection. microsoft hired a new ad agency and pitched bing as a decision engine, with a different homepage layout that ran a daily background image. underneath, the index and the relevance code were a continuation of the live search work that had been shipping since 2006. live search did not die so much as get a new name and a marketing budget large enough to make people notice.

i did not switch to bing in 2009 and never have. by then i was on broadband at home, deep in google search and gmail and google reader, with no real reason to try a microsoft alternative. live search was the search engine i can name without remembering ever using, which is the worst possible outcome for a product that needed brand recall to grow.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually had ~

live search had a real engineering team and a real index. by 2008 the engineering org was run by satya nadella, who would later run azure and then microsoft itself. the search stack handled web, image, news, and video. there was a microsoft encarta tab that let you query the encyclopedia inside the search box, which made sense in 2006 and looked dated by 2008. there was a desktop tab that searched your local windows index. the verticals were the part microsoft tried hardest to differentiate on, since the core web ranking was not going to beat google on its own.

in 2008 microsoft launched live search cashback, which paid you a small percentage back when you bought something through a merchant you found via live search. the program had retailers like ebay and barnes and noble. it was a quiet success in retention terms and was carried forward into bing for a while before microsoft shut it down. cashback was the closest live search came to a feature that did something google did not.

~ why the brand failed ~

the live family of brands was the underlying problem. microsoft had pinned the entire post-msn online strategy on the word live, and consumers had no reliable way to tell live search from live mail from live messenger from live spaces from live id from windows live writer. the word live was supposed to signal cloud-connected microsoft, in practice it signaled microsoft did a rebrand again. internal microsoft communications from the period, surfaced in later antitrust disclosures, had executives openly worrying that the live name was hurting the products it covered.

the second piece was that google had already won the search habit. by 2007 google had crossed 60 percent global search share and was still growing. yahoo was the second-place engine and had its own brand. live search had no obvious story for why anyone with a working google bookmark would switch. cashback was an answer but a thin one, and it required a specific shopping intent the search engine did not get often enough.

~ the day it became bing ~

the bing announcement happened at the all things d conference on 28 may 2009. steve ballmer presented it as a decision engine, the bing.com domain went live on 1 june 2009 in beta and on 3 june 2009 for real. the live search url redirected. the live search tab in internet explorer became the bing tab. windows 7 shipped a few months later with bing baked in across the operating system. the live search brand itself was not mourned anywhere visible, which is almost a useful data point on its own.

bing went on to absorb yahoo search in a 2009-2010 deal and to power duckduckgo's web results for years afterward. it later became the search backend that openai picked when chatgpt browsing went live in 2023. live search was the version of the same engine that arrived before any of that mattered, with a name microsoft itself stopped believing in halfway through. it ran for two years and nine months under that name and turned into something else entirely.

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