Have you “binged” anything lately? If not, then don’t sweat it. Microsoft just release a new search engine called Bing, which you may or may not have heard about yet. Really? Another search engine? I thought Live.com was their SE of choice. Well, if you go to live.com now it actually points to bing.com.
So how does the new search engine stack up? From my short review of it, it behaves surprisingly similar to Google, the de-facto standard in search engines and close to being a common household term. Once you search you have links at the top to view images and videos of the same search terms and various other options including shopping, news and maps. The interface looks very nice. It looks like they borrowed the home page from ask.com in that there is a boxed image around the search input. The difference is the bing image changes every day, plus you can scroll back through past images.
One nice feature that I like is the video search. It lists an image preview for the results and lists below the preview where the video is hosted (YouTube, MySpace, MetaCafe). Then when you click on the preview it plays the video right in the search results in a video player at the top. Very sleek.
So will this be the final, once and for all Google killer? Yeah… I seriously doubt it. It does basically the same thing with maybe a little more pizaz. However it is nice to have company’s out there innovating to push the envelope and make the internet a nicer and more usable place to be.