On the Internet, a search engine is a coordinated set of programs that includes:
- A spider (also called a "crawler" or a "bot") that goes to every page or representative pages on every Web site that wants to be searchable and reads it, using hypertext links on each page to discover and read a site's other pages
- A program that creates a huge index (sometimes called a "catalog") from the pages that have been read
- A program that receives your search request, compares it to the entries in the index, and returns results to you
This product belongs to Microsoft's Windows Live series, which includes a personalized portal and other dynamic, online tools such as e-mail and instant messaging, mapping, and Web search. Windows Live provides you with a handy, personal login page featuring all the news you choose, as well as instant messaging, e-mail, and other tools.
Live search was the search engine that preceded Microsoft's BING. Microsoft has to exert tremendous effort against the ever growing Google search, that is why it put a lot of improvements for BING. I've witnessed Live search and was not impressed by it's indexes and results. From then on I always use google search for all of my research works and searches. Live search has a lot of shortcomings it should improve on, hopefully live.com search engine will cover those....