Microsoft has redesigned its new search engine.

This week Microsoft launched a news version of its news search engine. Actually, for us it was a bit hard to notice the changes at first.

We live in Norway, and our Live insisted on delivering the old news search home page for news.live.com, and that page doesn’t even contain the word “news” in the headline!

We did find a page with a list of the most popular news topics to the front page, as well as a list of popular queries. There were no pictures, though, and no news summaries.

After much huffing and puffing we did finally manage to track down the page we believe to be Live’s new news home page — the US version that is, and not the UK one:

As you can see, this is a true news portal with story headlines, text snippets and images — a bit like Google News in fact.

According to the Live Search Blog these are the most important changes:

• Aggregated news: Live now pulld in up-to-date news headlines for users to browse, which include top stories and category-specific articles. Breaking news is clearly identified and up to the minute when it happens.
• Local news from US states.
• Multimedia content, including images and videos with smart-motion thumbnails.

We like it a lot. The design is clear and easy to read, and even less cluttered than its Google counterpart. The news selection seems relevant for a US audience.

(We do wish they wouldn’t start playing videos without us asking for it, but you can’t have everything.)

You get to the search result pages (SERPs) if you click “more on this story” or type a search into the search box.

The SERPs now include:

• Filtering based on your location,
• Or you can filter by the dominant categories of your search.
• Live suggests related searches.
• You can now sort articles by date.
• When they are available you get videos directly in the results.

This is great news for searchers. We have often been pretty harsh towards Live here at Pandia, most of all because we believe Google needs more competition from better competitors and partly because we find it hard to understand why Live has been unable to deliver better search services. Microsoft is one of the biggest tech companies in the world. The bid for Yahoo! proves that there is no lack of capital and we know there is a lot of talent within the company.

Well, the new Live News shows us that Microsoft can deliver. And what’s more: This is not the end of it. Live promises us RSS support and blog search in the near future.