How do I add Windows Live Search to my Blog?

You seem to have figured out how to add just about any search box to a Web site, Dave, so I'm hoping you can give me step-by-step instructions on how to add Microsoft's new Live Search Box to my site. Thanks.

Actually, great request, because I've been quite interested in learning more about Live Search ever since reading that the results of the search pop up as a new layer atop your existing page, rather than moving people to a new page. Neat idea, eh?

Start out by going to Live Search for Websites. Don't get sidetracked, though. The basic search is not what you want:

As you can read in the graphic, that's the most basic of searches and the search results will replace your page, rather than appear magically above it as a layer.

What you want is what they call Advanced Search:

Click on it and you'll find that there are a number of different types of searches you can do: a Site search, a Web-wide search or a Macro search. Let's proceed with the Web-wide search first, as it's the easiest. Here's what you'll choose:

Choose "Next" and you get a big hairy box of HTML that you just copy and paste onto your page or, if you're a blogger, into your weblog template:

Here's how it works, the code that I've gone ahead and pasted into this very blog entry:

(Safari users, this won't work for you. It works with Internet Explorer and Firefox 2.0 only, as far as I can tell)

Let's make this a bit more interesting, however, and create a search tool for my weblog. To do that, I'll back up and choose "Site Search" instead of "Web Search" on the configuration page. It has lots of options:

Configuration's easy enough: give your new search a name and specify up to ten different URLs for it to examine, and again click "Next" to get the code block. The code looks basically the same, but here, try this search and see how it differs:

Either way, this should give you all the details you need to figure out how to add Microsoft Live Search to your website or blog. Enjoy!