Recently published interview with Justin Osmer - Senior Product Manager at Microsoft – touched upon Live QnA product. Introduced last September, this service “is a very good place to go for opinion based sorts of things”. When it goes about some rather complex queries that plain automated search engine is not able to give an accurate answer for there is a good option to ask the question you’re interested in at Live QnA.

QnA starts to get at a larger problem of search that we would love to help solve. That is that it takes a long time to get to the answer (or the information that you are looking for) to some of the more complex queries that you might enter; the algorithms can only do so much for you there. And so, it gets to a point where it makes a lot of sense to have another person help you answer that question. And, how can we put you in touch with another person? And, how can we tap into this vast community of users that we already have inherently baked in if you will into, Windows Live. So, we have our Windows Live Hotmail folks, we have our Windows Live Instant Messenger folks. That’s a huge database of people who have signed into our service, have a login, email address, and participate at some level (More than 500,000 total). Being able to use that group of people to ask questions is a great resource.

This functionality is mainly treated rather as an enhancement to the search and might be integrated to the Live search results page in some time. That is how we all become witnesses of how social web is flowing into the world of search.

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