Microsoft has officially lifted the covers off its Live Search competitor to Google, announcing that the software company is taking its new search product out of beta. However, a quick visit to the www.live.com page will show a site similar to Google's but still with the red Beta tag appended.

There is a handy feature (although some may consider it an invasion of privacy) called Local, that allows you to search for the location of people or businesses using the mapping program Virtual Earth.

Other features include images search, similar to Google's, as well as news search and a questions and answers search similar to that on Yahoo. Type in a question and you may get an answer, although the only one we could get to work was "Who is the world's richest person?"

As far as searches go, the display results are almost identical to Google's, complete advertising results on the right hand side of the page.

Live Search looks a lot like a me too effort from Microsoft. However, the company is very good at picking up on someone else's winning formula and using its leverage on the desktop to win marketshare. Whether it can do that to Google is another matter. {moscomment}