It looks like Windows Live Shopping is finally live. From the blog post entitled Ta Da! from the Windows Live Shopping team's blog we get the following excerpt
Today we launch the brand new Windows Live Shopping site!
What is it?
It is the beta launch of Microsoft’s Web 2.0 shopping experience,
featuring one of the world’s largest product catalogs, user-created
content and an easier-to-use interface built on 100% AJAX technology.
It uses a unified shopping engine to search or browse almost 40 million
products from 7,000 stores ranging from many of the country’s leading
retailers to eBay. Results are displayed in an order that is not
affected by advertising; merchants cannot pay to have their items show
up closer to the top. Users will be able to drag-and-drop items to a shopping list and share lists with friends; see user reviews of products and sellers; and read and create public shopping guides on any subject.
You can get more of an inside perspective on the new service from the Ian McAllister's blog post entitled Windows Live Shopping Beta Has Hatched where he talks about some of the thinking that led to the creation of the service.
Unfortunately, as noted by Mike Arrington in his post Microsoft Live Shopping Launches - But No Firefox the site doesn't support Firefox. This is a known issue and one the team will address in the future. I personally think they should have waited until Firefox support was working. As Mike Arrington points out a lot of geeks and power users have switched to Firefox from IE. Mike states that 70% of TechCrunch's traffic is from Firefox users. In December 2005, Boing Boing stated that more of their readers use Firefox than IE.
Luckily some folks from the IE team helped me fix my IE 7 problems and I got to try out the service. The user interface is definitely snazzy in the way that all Windows Live services have become. Dragging and dropping items into a shopping list is a neat touch as is the slider that lets you control the amount of detail or images in the search results. It doesn't seem that the search index is quite populated yet. Below are search results for an item I've been wanting to buy for the past few weeks [and just purchased after running these searches] from eBay, Froogle, Windows Live Shopping and Yahoo! Shopping.
- Search for "transformers decal" on eBay
- Search for "transformers decal" on Froogle
- Search for "transformers decal" on Windows Live Shopping
- Search for "transformers decal" on Yahoo Shopping
How would you rank the quality and quantity of those results?