First look at Bing.com

Today was the first day that Bing.com was open to the public.  In case you didn’t hear Bing.com is the new brand for Microsoft’s search  You can read the press release here.  It will take a while to decide if it’s better than live.com was, or for that matter if it is any better than Google or Yahoo.  My guess is that it will be better in some ways and still lacking in some.  But clearly they have been thinking through more about how the user uses search. 

One quick search comparison that I think quickly highlight how they are going after the “Organized Search Experience” and the “Simplified Tasks and insight” as they put it.  First, I tried searching on my camera – Nikon D200 and here’s what I got for results from Google

 

That same search on Bing.com produced the following results

You can see on the left, a list of tasks or actions I can take.  So if I click on Lenses it takes me to search results for Lenses.

Bing.com is clearly a work in progress as some things still say Live or Virtual Earth but rebranding takes time.  I also hope that more work is done on the display of search results to use more of my display.  Currently Google, Bing and Yahoo all only utilize half of my wide screen monitors which is pretty crazy.  Maybe they could all spend some time on new layouts of results for wide screens!

Virtual Earth was also rebranded Bing Maps for Enterprise – more details on that here.  I’m still a little skeptical on that rebranding, but I will try to keep an open mind!   I can understand the consumer part of that being rebranded because it was already confusing being called Live Search Maps, but Virtual Earth had enterprise name recognition.

So go try Bing.com and let me know what you think of it!  I think it’s interesting to watch as the search game evolves – I still think there’s room for a lot more innovation that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft just don’t know what it is yet.  It will probably be some small startup that will have the magic invention!