It’s strange. Microsoft, with all it’s power, has been dragging along behind Google for some years now. It was really seen as the poor cousin in internet circles and most “serious” users opted to use Google for all their searches. From my experience the majority of users of Microsoft’s MSN.com or their rebranded Live.com search engine seem to have used it because it was easy - they either had MSN set as their home page or they used Hotmail regularly and so MSN was always to hand.
Personally, I’ve always used Google, primarily because of the quality of their results. A search on MSN or Live was a slow and inaccurate process that inevitably turned up all sorts of poor quality or irrelavent sites.
However Microsoft have recently rebranded their search engine *again* (how many times are they going to do it?!) in the form of Bing.com, which is being backed by a massive advertising campaign to promote the new site.
So, is it actually any good, or is it just MSN by another name?
I recently set out to test the search engine out for size, and I have to admit that Microsoft really have added some neat features.
But before I get to them, it’s worth mentioning that the search results that Bing spits out are far more accurate than before, and in my experience now rival Google’s for quality. So that’s a big move in the right direction.
But there are two other features which really jumped out at me when using Bing, which really add to the useability of the site.
Firstly, down the left hand side of the page, you will find a list of related searches, much like Google shows at the bottom of each page. Having them at the side, however, encourages more searching and, as with all long string keyword searches, will likely lead to more accurate search results.
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