We reported almost a month ago that QnA is moving from Live Search to MSN. Today the QnA team officially announced the latest updates to the QnA website, including a new look for QnA with the standardised MSN headers. Here’s a snapshot of what’s been changed:

Added new MSN branding

Added new question-type selection feature (for conversational or informational questions)

Update to the QnA Beta Supplement to the Code of Conduct

Update to the spell checker

As you can see in the screenshot, QnA has been officially updated with the (new?) green MSN header. The layout hasn’t been modified heavily though and it remains pretty much the same as before. What really frustrates us though is that the link to MSN QnA is still via http://qna.live.com . Typing http://qna.msn.com in the address bar will not get you to the website. Microsoft, if you’re ever going to rebrand something, please make sure the URL does the change too.

In terms of functionality, what has changed though in this update is that you no longer have to tag your conversational questions as “conversational”, you will now be able to select the type of the question being asked when you post the question, as shown below:

It is said that the spell checker has also been updated to include additional words to its dictionary.

For more information on how to determine whether a question is conversational or informational, refer to QnA’s team blog. I expect they’ll move the Spaces address soon to something without the "live” in its name.