Just recently I have been reading about the improvements in the Live services and then I saw Steve's entry on Live Books (Live Search Books...wow) and thought I had better go see what was going on.  I went to the live search and searched for my favourite author and sure enough, up came his books, but what was nice is that most people don't know that Robert Heinlein also had an interest in the US economy.  Books referring to his works here also appeared.  I was then able to see how much of a reference to him was made and even choose to view those pages if the publisher of the book allowed it. Oh, try http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=&mkt=en-US&scope=books&FORM=BBBB to get to the books search I also notices a load of other services you might want to try out:

  Web, images, videos, news, maps (I'll cover this later), MSN are all standard.  Under the more tab though you get:

• Academic - I've used this to do research into academic papers that interest me
• Feeds - speaks for itself
• Health - See screen shot below
• Local - find local services - this is especially GREAT when using on a mobile - http://m.live.com
• Classifieds
• QnA - Ask questions and see if someone will answer them
• Macros - write macros to restrict / improve searches and then make them available to others

The Book Search

This is how my book search went - I put in the contents I wanted to see if a book.  Not the books have summary information and then when you hover over them, more detail is provided, including where and how much of the book your looking at has references to the items you want to search

Click on the book to see more

To respect peoples property, the author may request a limit of how many pages you can view.  To make this work, you might be prompted to sign in

The pages in my book, with the detail I wanted to read

Now for healthcare

  This is just a quick aside.  I searched for back pain in the health care section - I got 3 sections of results - articles, web searches and sponsored links.  Amazingly clear and simple.

I'll be writing more about live soon - Maps has also gone through a revolution.

ttfn

David