In Microsoft's Windows Live Mail Desktop, one of the nicest hodgepodge of names that I've ever seen, they will have a neat new feature called “Active Search.” What is active search you ask, well we'll have the Windows Live Mail Desktop blog tell us.

Much of what you need to get done online – from planning your next vacation to remembering to buy flowers for your mom on her birthday – is piling up in your inbox, just waiting for you to take action, usually by looking something up on the web.

With this in mind, we’ve designed Active Search to make it easier for you to act on anything that piques your interest while reading your email. That’s why we show you key search terms we find in a message and provide a search box right underneath, so you can quickly search for terms of your own.

In other words it's keyword based advertising. The rest of the post tries to explain what all Active Search does without ever really calling it advertising, until the end.

Active Search provides advertisers with a powerful way to reach consumers with text advertising that is very relevant to their daily lives. Contextually targeted sponsored links are shown automatically for the relevant keywords Active Search finds as users read their email; these will be provided by Kanoodle during our beta. Paid search sponsored links are shown whenever users select alternative keywords or enter in their own search terms; these are delivered by Microsoft adCenter.

So a huge multi-billion dollar company can't eat the cost of an email client, a cost they have been eating for years with both Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. They pass of the cost onto the users and try to hide this by giving it a fancy name. I can't wait for Windows Live Web Desktop with an integrated Active Search banner that spans the entire window width right below the tab bar.

Tags: microsoft, windows_live