MSN has for some time now been testing its new search site, Live.com (cp. our article MSN Search to be replaced by Windows Live Search).

Live Search is now out of beta.

The MSN Search Blog — or rather the Live Search’s Weblog as it is called now — reports that by Thursday all searchers using the MSN Search site be served Live.com results as well. Whether the MSN Search brand will disappear is unclear, but the MSN Search Engine is clearly dead.

Among recent improvements we note:

• A new and cleaner lay out for search result pages.
• A “scope bar”, i.e. a line of buttons which lets you switch between results from Web, image, local maps/direction, video search and so on without having to re-enter your query in the search box.
• Related searches in the right hand column.
• Local search, now out of beta.
• Upgraded image search. Search Engine Watch notes that MSN’s image search used to be powered by PicSearch: “Microsoft is now using its own internally developed image search algorithms and index that have been over a year in the making”. Moreover, Live.com has added a “scratchpad” that lets you save images as a “collection”.
• Live QnA (an expert answering service, still in beta)
• Video Search beta (which shows that MSN takes YouTube and other video download sites very seriously).

What others say:

Jeremy Zawodny: “Wow. It’s fast and relevant. In my queries it compares very, very well with Google and Yahoo. The design feels, for lack a better term, “friendly.” Spam isn’t hard to find, but it also doesn’t bubble it’s way up in places I might have expected. Microsoft has come a loooong way on this.”

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Journal: “But I think Miscrosoft has also done a nice job in enabling users to move smoothly through a range of “verticalâ€? tabs (Web, images, news, QnA, local, products, video, etc.). See, for example, how quickly and nicely you can move through a range of information about the US Open by clicking the tabs/buttons on the horizontal nav.”

Gary Price at Resource Shelf: “On image feature we were surprised not to see (at least for now) is image results based on web search query. For example, image of xxx or pics of xxx. This is something that Ask, Google, and Yahoo offer.”