Bing is Microsoft’s new service for Internet searches. As I wrote last month, its search results are more or less comparable to Google and it has some nice design touches that can make it easier to use than Google. You may want to give it a look, especially if you’re doing searches in the categories of travel, shopping, health, or local business information – Bing has particular strengths for those searches to help you narrow in on useful information.
New York Times columnist David Pogue just wrote a column about the comparison between Bing and Google and the surprising discovery that Bing can be more useful in small but important ways. Want to check for yourself? Do a search at www.bing-vs-google.com and you can see the results from both services in the same window.
Here’s one feature you might not notice right away. Do a search on Bing, then move your mouse down the search results on the right, in the area where the arrow is pointing in the picture below. A box will pop up for each search result with a paragraph or two of text from the page, plus a selection of links from the page. That’s cool! You can tell if a search result is helpful without having to click to the page.
Oh, and one more thing. Bing uses gorgeous photographs on its home page, each with some hot spots with random facts and links. (It’s an attractive way to contrast with Google’s plain white page.) There’s an archive of the Bing images here that’s worth looking through – they make beautiful wallpaper.
