Microsoft has forgone its Live search engine in favour of the newly launched Bing, now in beta. For those in the know, the service formerly went under the name of Kumo, which sounds better to us, but hey, a good engine is a good engine, and Bing does work well. 9af901df
The design overall is very similar to Google, even down to the preferences page. Like iGoogle, this one offers the option to link up with your e-mail, assuming it is provided by Microsoft. Though it doesn’t boast themes and gadgets like the former service, we would anticipate this to come once the beta is complete.
Impressions so far are good, and neat features like related searches (i.e. walkthroughs pop up if you search for a game), pop-up text (mouse over a search result and the page text appears, something Firefox plugins offer with Google), and a cashback program for shopping results are all welcome.
In terms of actual search quality, it’s more or less the same as Google. In any case, there’s plenty of depth to explore which may make it the superior choice for some in the end, especially as more functionality and improvements are brought to the table.
Tags: Bing, Google, IE, Live, Microsoft, Search, search engine, Vista, Windows, XP