Just saw someone twitter about this, and seems to be true, although not sure how long this has been going on: when you sign out of Hotmail, instead of being taken to MSN.com, you are now taken to www.live.com.  This works even if you have, say, Google.com set as your default search in IE.

So signing in to Hotmail from MSN:

and then signing out:

Takes you to www.live.com:

Unfortunately, since lately live.com has turned into one great big beta test, with features appearing and disappearing at will, we can’t use the pager to go back to yesterdays cute otters picture.  Here’s some baby otters, anyway:

Sending people to visit the live.com page seems like a no brainer to get them to try out Live Search, although the advertisers on MSN.com might not be too happy.