Following an extremely long period of inactivity (in fact, the team blog's last post was back in April 2007), Live Search Products has finally been updated along with the latest wave of Live Search releases. We've always thought that product search had been left out of Live Search ever since the last major update and became what is known as the "Shopping Search vertical". But today the Live Search team surprised us with a brand new page for product search.

This is what we used to see:

And this is what we came across today:

You can see that you're now able to refine your search results on the left by user opinions, brands, category, and price range. In comparison to the old product search, we found that the search results have improved dramatically (try typing in "MP3 Players" in the old and new search). Other improvements, although available before as part of the Shopping Search vertical already, include the ability to compare prices and view user ratings and reviews.

You can get to the new Live Search Products page by going to http://search.live.com/products .