For Microsoft, the Internet-search battle with Google is a never-ending cat-and-mouse play but for the sake of healthy competition we should all praise Redmond’s efforts to offer us a worthy alternative.

Yes, we all know that Google is so popular today that it entered dictionaries as a verb, we also know that it practically “owns” half of all the Internet searches but hey, why not give Microsoft’s Live Search a try after the recent modifications?

According to a blog posting on Live Spaces, the recent overhaul operated by the third most used search engine on the Web is “the biggest update since our debut in January 2005.” In the respective press release, Microsoft underlines that enhancements can be seen in the core search technology and that other deeper advancements are noticeable in the vertical search areas of entertainment, shopping, local and health.

“With this update to Live Search, our engineering focus is on the areas that matter most to our 185 million consumers who use our service every month. We have made dramatic progress in delivering a better search experience to our customers,” said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of the Search and Advertising Platform Group at Microsoft. “We know what kinds of things consumers are searching for, and we have invested in those key high-interest verticals, including entertainment, shopping, health and local search. With the core platform in place we intend to win customers and earn their loyalty one query at a time.”

Apparently, Microsoft’s Live Search team has received feedback from “thousands” of customers, which have helped improving the overall search relevance in order to deliver richer and deeper results.

First and foremost Redmond’s engineers have focused on improving the relevance and they apparently achieved that by quadrupling the size of Live Search’s index, “which means we can return the right results for your searches.” The larger index coverage, completed by the use of advanced ranking algorithms, auto-spell correction and better stop word handling, lays the foundation not only for better search-results, but also provides Microsoft with a solid background when dealing with the continuous expansion of the Web. Apparently, the increase in indexed content ranges from 5 billion pages to more than 20 billion, and Microsoft said that it had come up with a new way of extracting data from the Web which automatically adds information from specific domains to the data base, including ratings and reviews; businesses (locations, contact information, photos, hours of operation, ratings and reviews); celebrities (buzz, images and videos) and more.

Common “problems” for search engines like spelling errors, stop words, punctuation and synonyms are now treated better with by Live Search, thanks to the “substantial” improvements in understanding query intent. So basically Live Search can “understand” what you wanted to search for, despite the fact that your search query is not very clear.

The way results are displayed on the page has also undergone some modifications and relevant links are now easier to read thanks to work on typography, contrast, colors and spacing. Also, pages load much faster than before according to Microsoft, although I have not personally noticed any significant change for that matter.

Microsoft also boasts with the complicated core algorithms that power its search engine, which now incorporates more user click-stream data to inform ranking and relevancy processes, yielding more relevant results across queries. In addition to that, the same algorithms can even proactively change the results of a search query if they “are confident” that the client’s intention was to search for something different than what was initially typed.

The feedback Microsoft received from customers showed that a specific answer to a specific query was more desirable than a plethora of vaguely related links, so Redmond’s engineers worked on improving Live Search’s Answers section, mainly in specific areas such as weather, images, celebrities and entertainment, sports, stocks, Yellow Pages, maps or quick facts from Encarta. This specialized content has been more deeply integrated into the main search experience to add to custom searches such as images and mapping.

Customers’ searches have also revealed their interest in having clearly delimitated domains like entertainment, shopping, health and local search, with more than 40% of the search queries falling into the aforementioned categories. So Microsoft added Entertainment, Shopping, Health and Local to Live Search, but went even further with Scopes (which allows people to see search results from Web pages, local maps and directions, images, videos, and more without the need to re-enter the same query each time or to leave the page) and with Video (powered by a new in-house video search technology, this allows users to search for and browse online video content, and watch high-quality videos from the Web. With a new smart motion preview feature, consumers can now preview video within the search results by rolling over the thumbnail of the video). Of course, Live Search Academic, Books, QnA and Macros (allows consumers to create their own custom search engines or use customizations created by others who share their interests to make their searches more relevant) are still available.
Currently, Microsoft’s Live Search engine trails Google and Yahoo, having a market share of 11.3 percent in the US.

By comparison, Google, with the 5.5 billion core searches conducted in August on its sites according to ComScore, has a market share of 56.5 percent, while Yahoo comes second with 23.3 percent.

During the Searchification event held on September 27 at its Mountain View offices, Microsoft also showed off the new mobile search client, a Software plus Services implementation for the mobile phone, which combines proprietary speech-recognition software crafted at Redmond for handhelds with Live Search’s power.