This past week, I’ve been participating in the private technical preview of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, and I like what I’ve been seeing. Now it’s available to the public at www.bing.com.  I did a full review for this week’s edition of VistaNews at www.vistanews.com and this blog post is a companion piece to that article, since we don’t do screenshots in the newsletter itself. So please read the article first for details of the new features, and then see the screenshots below.

Click on the pictures to enlarge them.

 
The bing “front page” from which you start your search is simple and much more attractive than Google’s

However, a search engine needs much more than a pretty face (after all, Live Search had that). Bing delivers.

The pop-up page preview is my favorite feature in bing.

I love that I can often get the information I need (or discover that the site isn’t what I’m looking for) without even going to the page.

The preferences page lets you identify your location to get search results more relevant to your area

 
You can choose whether broader included terms should be displayed.

A search for “eSATA housing” includes results for “SATA housing” but with a simple click, you can restrict the results to just those that contain “eSATA.”

 
Advanced Search allows you to look for results from a specific country or region

In function, Bing is a search portal as well as an engine. An interesting aspect of this is that you can read full articles without ever leaving the Bing site:

 
This full article on leukemia can be read without leaving the Bing site

A search for “color printer” on Bing turns up useful links at the top to top brands, printers categorized by price, and printer buying guides

All in all, Bing performs well. Is it a Google Killer? Only time will tell.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com