Right now, if you type in www.live.com you’ll end up at www.bing.com. A very sensible move from Microsoft to promote their whizzy new search engine. The problem is that this live.com -> bing.com switch happens for any live.com URL. So it works pretty well for getting to the home page, but it causes real problems with deeper links, since these don’t exist in Bing.
Remember Live.com was/is a personal start page site (you can still get to it by clicking the Windows Live link in the Bing homepage). There are all sorts of links out there that facilitate adding content, feeds and widgets (gadgets) to your page. Most of the links I’ve seen go to www.live.com, and right now if they go there they’re broken.
Like Microsoft’s own Live.com widget gallery for instance. If you choose to add a web gadget from there, you are sent to a page like this:
http://www.live.com?add=http://download.gallery.start.com/d.dll/2~1~758~41387/gadget.xml
Problem is that this redirects to
http://www.bing.com?add=http://download.gallery.start.com/d.dll/2~1~758~41387/gadget.xml
Since Bing is a search engine, not a personalized start page system, this link does precisely nothing.
I’ve tested a bunch of widgets, and all of them seem to have the same problem for adding to Live. Ones that have the option to add to Live Spaces, which essentially posts the widget as a blog entry, don’t seem to be affected.
How did the Bing rollout group not spot that this problem was going to happen? That deep links exist out in the web world that will just fall flat on Bing? I’ve even read a report that says “The biggest consequence of live.com redirecting is that Live Search can no longer be accessed by URL, from a browser’s search bar, nor from a mobile device”. I haven’t checked it out in detail, but if it’s true that seems a pretty big consequence to me.
I’d've expected a bit more care from a company spending $100M on advertising. But maybe they shortchanged the rollout effort to get that budget.
Chris Pointon
SVP Technology, OTOlabs
http://www.otolabs.com
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