Here are a few suggestions to improve Live Favories:
Hi Scott,
Thanks for the suggestions! I'm intrigued by your fourth point: "Integrate search results on Live.com with Live Favorites". What sort of integration do you have in mind?
Thanks,
-Danny
Let's say that I search for the word microsoft. Right now the first result looks something like this:
Microsoft Corporation
Find free downloads, support, tips, and details on all Microsoft products.
www.microsoft.com
If I had a favorite pointing to this url then the result should indicate that, much the same way that the cached page link shows up and maybe some shading, bolding or background changes:
Microsoft Corporation
Find free downloads, support, tips, and details on all Microsoft products.
www.microsoft.com My Favorite
I would also like to see a list of all matching favorites show up somewhere. So if I had favorites to Microsoft Press and MSDN the results would show up on the side:
Matching Favorites
MSDN
Microsoft Press
You could alternatively put these in some sort of horizontal list or cloud above the search results.
Does that help?
Yes, I think I understand what you're looking for now.
However, I'm not sure how useful it would be in general. Don't people tend to bookmark pages as favorites (like www.recipes.com/pastries/4959966ah.html much more often than top-level domains (www.recipes.com)? And even with top-level domains in the favorites list, how often will those match the search results URL? Very rarely, since search returns page references.
If these assumptions are correct, I would guess that a search result would match a favorites URL only once in a blue moon. So the "my favorite" tag next to the search result would almost never be seen.
The idea of showing search results filtered by your favorites list sounds more productive. I know some folks bookmark way too much stuff, so being able to just search through that to find something rather than trying to remember how you categorized it would be a big help. That's also the role of adding tags to your favorites, but some people are too lazy to do that (me!).
Thanks for the suggestions!
-Danny
