When you want to use the staggering resources of the Internet to look for black forest cake recipes or pictures of Scarlett Johansson, most of us go to the same place every time. Google’s the top choice, though there’s Yahoo, AOL, Ask.com or many others.
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Since Microsoft is looking for new ways to move beyond your home computer and offer remote services, they’ve decide to re-enter the search fray with an engine called Bing. And they’ve made sure people will use it, since Yahoo’s agreed to switch its searches to Microsoft’s new service.
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Sure, Microsoft has a long history of, ahem, following closely in the footsteps of ideas and concepts offered by other people. And at first glance, Bing looks a heck of a lot like Google.
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But Bing, whose name is supposed to evoke a positive bell ring, actually makes the process of searching a little more intuitive, at least the times it works.
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The initial interface is pretty minimal like Google’s, though it lacks the easy advanced search button Google has. The real difference comes in the search results.
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Often, whatever you look for will have a short list of suggested sub-categories on the left. Colon cancer will suggest symptoms, causes and treatment among others. Oklahoma has state parks, tourism and facts.
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Another innovation is the ability to get a brief preview of pages by hovering your mouse over a link. It’s quick and gives a fair amount more information than the usual brief description search engines show below their links.
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And its shopping component can be very helpful. A search for a product can get you a main product page with a description, user reviews, professional reviews and links to shops to buy it, arranged by price.
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Even shopping searches that have more than one result can be easily arranged in shopping, as I could…