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At last, Bing has arrived. I do not know what MSFT was thinking when they came up with this name "bing" but according to someone in one of the social networking site , BING could be an acronym for "But It’s Not Google". I have tested a Beta release of Microsoft's new search/decision engine. In few words I can say fair amount of features increase compared to its earlier "live" search engine but still way far behind Google.Bing has a better and more meaningful “Related Search”. It uses technology from Powerset (a search technology company Microsoft acquired) to display refined versions of your query


To see how well it Performs, Here's a breakdown of its new features and how well they perform

1. Left Explorer pane
Bing's new lefthand navigation menu called the Explorer Pane. This extra column of content includes Quick links that break searches down into Web Groups relevant to your search.

For example, a search on "iPhone 3g" triggers the Explorer Pane to create Quick Tabs for unlocked, GPS, and Features all based on what your intent might be.

Under Quick Tabs in the Explorer Pane are additional subcategories such as 'Related Searches' and 'Search History'; the latter, as its name implies, shows you recent searches. Microsoft asserts that 50 percent of all searches are repeats, and that providing a session history therefore offers a shortcut to results of redundant searches.

My View: The Explorer Pane can be extremely useful, which may make the trade-off of cluttering up the search results page worthwhile.

2. I have 10 blue links
When we key in for any search in Google, It lists out first 10 results in the first page. Which is generally termed as ""ten blue links" approach to reporting search results . Now Bing also joined the band wagon and it also lists out 10 blue links.

Apart from that it also has its 'Quick Preview' feature which gives you a text-based synopsis of the pages displayed in your search results. I dragged mouse cursor over individual search results for "Ford" and up popped a box of data pulled from the site.Which will give the idea about to follow the result or not.

My View: I didn't like the Quick Preview feature because I found that it took too long for boxes to pop up with text.

Also Sometimes, a Hover box would appear without text. In many cases when text did appear, it didn't give a strong enough clue as to whether the site was worth visiting. Given its shortcomings, this Bing feature may be the first to be axed.

3. Video/Image Search
Video and Image search has got a lot of improved features. Especially It allows you to choose layout,Size and quality as shown in the image beside. I really loved this but the only thing I didn’t like is that it is showing the webpages and videos embedded in its own website hence restricting the traffic to the real website.