Microsoft Bing has arrived

Well Microsoft’s Bing is finally here! And is it going to be Microsoft’s challenge to beat Google in the search arena.

Here are my thoughts after using Bing for most of the day:

Visual
I really like the look of the Bing homepage. It has pleasant wallpapers that are easy on the eye and they also change daily, some users may, or may not like this and see it as unnecessary.

Search
Forget about all the frills - the most important part of any search engine is the results that are returned to a user. With Bing, when you type in a keyword you not only get your results down the centre of the page but on the left hand side you also receive “Related Searches” similar go Google, but I think that they are more accessible. And as for the results that are returned, it does seem to come up with what I was actually searching for – so far.

What I really liked about the search results is the “Also On This Page” feature - which displays information in a subtle pop-up when you hover over the thin line, it brings up a description and further links within the page – a really nice touch.


Images
Bing also has the usual Image and Video search functions etc. But what really is cool is that you are able to personalise your image search by choosing from categories such as Size, Layout, Colour, Style and people. Also, if you click on an image it opens up the image and it also it shows rest of the images in a preview pane on the left hand side, which makes life a little easier rather than going back and searching through again.

Videos
A Nice touch on the videos is when you hover over a video it previews it – so no need to open up the whole video. Again, with videos you can choose from options Video Length, Screen size, Resolution and Source, which is excellent, to filter out the videos.

Overall
Bing is not going to conquer the search market straight away, but in the future who knows. It really is a great start and will no doubt extending on the already great features. Microsoft still has work to do, but is heading in the right direction with Bing.

Personally - I’m not yet confident to make that permanent switch from Google, but I will be using Bing.