The Windows Live Product Search Team has just released changes to Windows Live Product Search that boost customer-perceived relevance by increasing the number of query results with images to 88.6%. Previously, the number of query results with images was an average of 79.2%, with the rest having an empty white space, so this increase is clearly somewhat of an improvement. But there’s still some way to go until 100%.

But why aren’t there 100% images in the top results?  The reason for this is largely because many sites, including very reputable merchants like Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, and AceHardwareSuperStore.com, block image crawling bots or seriously throttle them.

The Windows Live Product Search Team will have to work with these sites to address these issues, but for the time being will just have to stay with the current improvements, which if I may say so vary from good to bad results depending on the product you searched for!

Try it out for yourself at: http://products.live.com/ and let me know what you think!