Geeks on PC

Microsoft may be back in business with their new search engine Bing. Considered to be a “decision engine,” Bing helps to find the most relevant and accurate content toward your questions or search words. The results in Bing are cleanly and efficiently displayed with relative searches in the sidebar and quick content preview in hoover over buttons. After the failure of their Windows Live search engine, Bing may be the one to compete with Google and Yahoo.

What’s with the name Bing?

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, hopes the name Bing will give the search engine a potential to be used as a verb. We’ve all heard people say “Google It” or “Do a Google.” Why wouldn’t someone say “Bing It” or “Do a Bing”. You could even refer to your searches on Bing as “Binging” or “Binged” something. The name may sound weird to you at first, but after using it for a while, you will realized it is no more weirder than Google.

Quick Tour of Bing

Your journey starts at bing.com. You’re welcomed to a cleanly designed webpage with categories listed in the side and a clean search bar nested next to the Official Bing Logo. You will notice a new image appearing in the middle of the page everyday. I have no idea what it’s supposed to do, but there is always something cool in there to look at with tags that make it look like it came from Flickr.

Already, Microsoft deserves a pat on the back for making a much better hompage compared to Google.

So after doing a quick search on places to eat in New York, I get a full list of high ranked restaurants within New York, NY followed by a list of websites with restaurant ratings for places to eat in New York. The search engine did a great job finding me correct results from accurate webpages that allowed me to easily find the restaurant I am looking for.

When hoovering over a result, you will see a “target.” By keeping your mouse over the orange target, you are able to see full content preview from the website as well as relative links on the webpage. Though Google shows something similar under each link, Bing does a better job by showing the actual paragraphs related to your searches.

That isn’t all of it

What I discussed above is skinning the surface of what Bing has to offer. The best way to see all the features it has to offer is to try the search engine yourself by visiting bing.com.

Remember, though Google has dominated the online world, Bing may just be able to catch up if it makes the right moves.