Microsoft Windows Live Search has announced a new beta site for Image and Video Search. MSN Search has provided Image and Video search for a long time. 
This new beta site has an improved User Interface, more AJAX sizzle, and new services like a Scratchpad for saving favorite images.
Windows Live Search and MSN Search seem to be running on different indexes at the moment. I performed an identical search on both services so that I could compare the results and the user interface, and got a different result set. Both result sets were accurate and relevant, they were just sorted and ranked differently.
Windows Live Search presents a cleaner interface and more information with the search results. This screen shot is of a video search result, presented in one column. There is a little box in the upper right corner of each result that can be clicked to expose more information on the result before actually visiting the source.
The Image search service is really nice. The results are presented as thumbnail images, 5 across on each line. Hover your mouse over a thumbnail and it becomes about twice as large and exposes more information about the image. There are also options to set how many image results to show per page and others to personalize the experience to your taste.
Windows Live is on a roll launching new products and services every week. Windows Live Writer was launched recently to critical acclaim. There are more Live Services coming... a lot more. Watch this space for future announcements.
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