Details of the refreshed Microsoft Live Search have been leaked by a Microsoft employee ahead of the official announcement at the Microsoft’s upcoming Searchification PR event on Wednesday September 26.

Akram Hussein, Program Manager – Windows Live Platform (pictured), posted screen shots and a description of the new service on his blog, after he mistakenly thought the service had gone live.

“So at almost 11 PM from my home PC trying to search the Internet the new live search just popped up, of course I thought the roll out has just begun but then I checked and made sure I wasn’t connected to the intranet,” explained Hussein on a recent blog posting. 

“I was fortunate to be one of the few lucky users who have externally been rolled out a beta version of live search.”

Hussein explained that no one at Microsoft deleted his blog post; he did so voluntarily.

“There is a lot of trust Microsoft put in their employees and this is just one of the things i adore about this company,” said Hussein. 

“In fact it was a very kindly mail asking not to say it was rolled out or released since still it is not. I pulled out the post right away when i found that the old live search is still working on my company PC, and that could just been a test roll out that I was lucky enough to handle.”

LiveSide.net, a website dedicated to covering Windows Live, managed to review the information and capture the screenshots uploaded by Hussein before he deleted his post.

Apparently the new search will feature “most popular products” from MSN shopping. It also appears to display more searches than the existing version (a search for digital cameras yielded 64 million results using the new search, while the current search yielded just 4 million).

The new Live Search will also display product reviews from the results pages (including review scores).

Perhaps the most interesting new feature is how Live Search will handle video. Here’s a snippet of Hussein’s original post (courtesy of LiveSide):

First searching video presents you with decent amount of results like Google but what’s better is that you can preview videos online by moving your mouse over any video and it will play a preview of the video right away no delays! Isn’t this amazing, at least now you can preview the video before really going and trying to view it, and make sure this is the one you want.

It’s interesting to note the comparison to Google, ”decent amount of results like Google”, though, you can hardly blame the folks at Microsoft for having Google top of mind when talking about Live Search, which has some way to go to catch with the almighty Google.

Given that Hussein seems to be a Microsoft “true believer” and is truly passionate about his job, this is probably one of the few times that confidential company information has been leaked by a contented employee, rather than someone who’s disgruntled.    

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Entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 5:54 pm under Google, Internet, Leaks, Microsoft.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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