GOOGLE GETs COMPETITION WITH MICROSOFT's BING

Dear Readers,

Microsoft Rolls Out Bing, Early

http://www.bing.com/

PLUS

Google Gets Some Competition

Finding is better than searching ! !!

Microsoft officially rolled out its Bing search engine on Monday, two days ahead of its scheduled June 3 release.

The software giant provided a sneak peak at Bing last week at the D: All Things Digital (D7) conference in Carlsbad, Calif.

"Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find," Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, said at the time. "When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web."

If this morning's headlines are any indication, it appears that people want to use the Web to access porn. Several blogs reported that turning off Bing's "safe search" component and searching for "porn" in the video search box turns up thumbnail search results depicting graphic sex acts. But doing a search for "porn" on Google and Yahoo will also produce plenty of Not Safe for Work on-screen content.

PCMag software analyst Michael Muchmore evaluated Bing last week and found that while the service is far from a Google killer, its slick interface and tailored search results definitely give the search engine giant a run for its money.

Bing returns Web results in a manner similar to Google or Yahoo, but it also has built-in helper tools for searches that aren't just about finding Web pages, particularly when it comes to travel, shopping, health, and local info.

For example, Microsoft utilized its purchase of Farecast to provide detailed travel search results like grids of what dates are the cheapest to travel, maps showing how far you can fly for below a certain price, and graphs of price changes over time.

Searching for a medical condition, meanwhile, will produce a "Bing Health Article" from a certified source like the Mayo Clinic. That page, hosted on Bing, will then provide more detailed information about the condition for which you are searching, as well as a "When to seek medical advice" section.

The main area in which Bing trailed Google, Muchmore found, was in the timeliness of its news. Google produced stories within 5 to 10 minutes while Bing often took up to 20 minutes to display the same article.