While Live Search hasn’t made much headway in the past year and hasn’t made a deal with Yahoo! to acquire their business, Microsoft seems to be more committed than ever to continue the uphill battle to make Live Search relevant.  Today, a couple of interesting tidbits show that Microsoft hasn’t given up the fight.

At TechFest, a science fair put on by Microsoft Research to show off the latest research projects, Microsoft announced Viveri.  You might remember that LiveSide commenters spotted the Viveri name last October, in our story about URank.  This summer Viveri will launch as a test site, separate from Live Search, to test new concepts and get public feedback without going through the formal process of adding them to Live Search. In addition, researchers at TechFest showed off GeoLive 2.0, Opinion Search, Renlifang, and Color-Structured Image Search.  You can read more about them on the Live Search blog.

And in some other search news, the folks at Powerset have written a couple of Ubiquity commands for Powerset and Live Search.  Ubiquity, “an experiment into connecting the Web with language”, comes from Mozilla Labs.  Powerset, purchased last year by Microsoft, shares a lot in common with Ubiquity, according to the Powerset blog: “the goal of the project is to reinvent the user interface through natural language”.  The Powerset blog posted a couple of videos that give us a quick glimpse of how Ubiquity, using the Powerset and Live Search commands, works.  Check them out on the blog.