Philipp: The reason you are having trouble is that Microsoft retired MSN Search a month ago. Their search engine is Live Search. It's an excellent search engine; you should write a review of it. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

What I meant is not that Live isn't by Microsoft... I was just wondering about its recognizability to typical users (not us!). On MSN you start with the MSN logo, and then go to Live, and on Live.com, you'll see "Windows Live". In any case, the bug I described was unrelated to the actual landing page – it simply prevented me from reaching that landing page in the first place due to a broken (inactive) dialog link! Other than that, I'm no fan of what MS is doing in terms of Live UI experiments on MSN or Live.com. http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-03-08-n49.html

It is odd. Maybe, it is because I have been running IE 7 since beta 1, but all of this worked for me. MSN search is in my list and now Live search is also. All dialog links seem to work as they should.

Use a decent browser... anything from the Mozilla project would be OK.

Dan, I'm not an IE user – as I said this was done for testing purposes. I use Firefox.

Google doesn't seem to release things unless they work. Then functionality is added incrementally.

Microsuck seems to load a product with functionality, only a few of which really work. Then incrementally fix the product after it's gone to market.

Something wrong here?

I just went through and selected Live Search (renamed from MSN Search) and it took me all of 20 seconds.

As for being recognizable by most people that are "not us", do you really think that the majority of people are using anything other than what came pre-loaded into IE6 (or later version) when they first bought their computer? I doubt most people, that are just casual users, will care what the browser's default search is. They'll just use what's there.

It's these people that Firefox is trying to get to convert, people like my co-workers and family that think that what they are using is just fine and see no reason to change. Unless of course MS forces a new version on them. Personally, I've used Firefox and didn't think it was that great. Especially when I never had any problems with IE in the first place.

Good luck Philipp.

I don't use IE nor msn due to bugs and unrelevancy. I hope someone will understand what you meant. I think you are more toward the trust behaviour of landing pages branding and getting what you ask for (not he's brother or sister)

That's fascinating that Google releases things that work with no problems, please tell us more about this, Michael Caron.

did anyone notice that the Google logo on MS page is different?

http://blogoscoped.com/files/ie7-search-providers.png

> I doubt most people, that are just casual users,
> will care what the browser's default search is. They'll
> just use what's there.

Good point. They'll use whatever's default, or enter e.g. google.com in their address bar.

>Good point. They'll use whatever's default, or enter e.g. google.com in their address bar.

Or enter google.com on their default search engine :)

Did anyone try making 'Live' their Default Search after adding 'Live'.. It seems to set 'Live' as the default but then when I hit 'OK' if goes back to Google..