Among other changes, Live Search will include improved ways to refine a search engine query so a user can better differentiate whether they are searching, for, say, the jaguar animal, car or Apple Computer Inc. operating system, said Christopher Payne, corporate vice president for Microsoft's Live Search effort.
In fact, the image search refinements were mentioned in a blog post about two weeks ago.
This update has improved relevance, an expanded index of images, faster AJAX code for the user experience, and a scratchpad for working on a collection of images. Also – check out the new “related names” feature by searching on anybody you consider famous – like Barry Bonds, George Bush, Bill Clinton or Oprah Winfrey.
Image search results pages also includes a slider to let the user determine the layout of the page and a pulldown to limit to specific sizes of images. Each image also includes a link to a "scratchpad" where you can store images. The AJAX drag and drop to the scratchpad is nice.
Searching for images of people, for example (Warren Buffet) includes a list of related names. Btw, Ask.com has been using Zoom technology with their image database since the beginning of the year. You'll not only find related names of people but also ideas to narrow or expand your search. Warren Buffet example at Ask.com. Zoom is also available with web search at Ask while Live Search only offers related searches.
One image feature we were surprised not to see (at least for now) is image results based on web search query. For example, image of xxx or pics of xxx. This is something that Ask, Google, and Yahoo offer.
Btw, Academic Search is not listed on the home page. You're given four options (web, images, news, local) and on a results page two more search options appear:
+ QnA
+ More (it's here you'll find links to academic, video, feeds, product (all betas), and macros.
+ The advanced search link as well as preferences/options has been moved off of the home page and is found below the search box. The results ranking sliders are still available.
+ Cached pages (nice) continue with a date stamp on the cached version.
+ Love the live sports scores for games in progress.
You can also now go directly to Live Search using the URL: Search.live.com. If you're logged in as a Live.com user, you can go to your personalized home page by using my.live.com.
Also, out of beta on Tuesday, Live Local in the U.S. and U.K. is the wonderful service with the bird's eye imagery (here's Union Station in D.C.) for many major metro areas. However, no word on if more bird's eye imagery has been made available. White pages data (people search) has also been added.
We've added dozens of new cities with birds eye coverage in this release. San Diego, Portland, Milwaukee, ... here is a growing Collection of them with the newest additions at the end. Lots of smaller cities have been added and many cities where we had coverage in the past have been greatly expanded. Check out Washington DC for instance, where coverage extends deep into the burbs. Also, in many cases it is really the entire county that is covered and not just the cities listed, so just use the pushpins as a starting point for exploration
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
