I’m a Binger now

Live.com, Microsoft’s previous search engine, was never going to penetrate the dominant force of Google. It did things slower, gave less accurate results, and really brought nothing new to the table. Even with Microsoft trying to make it the default search platform through their desktop live applications, they never really went anywhere with Live.com

Bing.com is the successor to Live.com, and its actually quite impressive. The search items page is less cluttered, the ads on the right are less obtrusive. The logo could with a bit of work, but maybe Microsoft may be onto something with this.

Some of its features include:

• A video search that gives a preview of  the video (with sound!) in the search engine itself.
• If you cant find what you’re looking for it will give quite relevant search queries that match the current one.
• Find out what search strings are popular with xRank.
• Search images and video be date , length , size etc..
• Categorised Searches
• Gives previews of each search item.
• Inline image search so that you don’t get lost
• Searching for cheap flights is easy with their travel page (which was hidden in the UK version of Bing)

I think Bing is an excellent alternative to Google, it mixes the computational power of Wolfram Alpha, with the search capabilities of Google. Things that are missing are that there’s no localised Bing for Ireland which means many of the useful features that I want, aren’t available to me. It current doesn’t give you an option add the search to Firefox, but this addon will, and it will use their search suggestions

Overall, Bing is surprisingly good search-engine, especially for one that is currently in Beta. Microsoft are currently on a roll, with the Xbox 360, Windows 7, and now this? I want to see how they market this thing, because hopefully they wont use Matthew Perry like they did when introducing Windows 95.