Microsoft just lunched their new beta web search live.com. It is part of their new AJAXed applications and introduces a new interaction modell when scrolling through search results.
First, after you enter the adress www.live.com you see only the search box. After some seconds the content gets created dynamically via AJAX-techniques (actually this might even be some more, since the HTML-code shows some MS-tags).
When you search the results are displayed in a box below the search box. There are two things now that draw my attention.
Dynamically updating list
Initially the list shows 9 entries. When you scroll down, the site retrieves additional results dynamically and adds them to the previous shown ones. So you now see some more entries. How much is depending how you scroll which is different as on other sites.
Scrolling updates the list
The really fancy thing about the results part is that it loads new results dynamically in the list as you scroll down the list. If you scroll not too fast you will scroll, scroll, and scroll some more until you have all search results in the list. This is really neat. The drawback is that you have to be in the results are to use it. It doesn’t start with the scroll wheel from the beginning.
I haven’t yet decided if I really like it or not since it changes the way a site is perceived and people can interact with. However, it is a good starting point for many other uses.
