A nice feature on Bing
Bing is the new search engine from Microsoft, although they call it “Decision Engine” we all know it is just a branding trick. I used it a little bit and I was pleasantly surprised.
The feature I really like is the preview feature. For example if you search for “PHP tutorial” you get this page:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=php+tutorial&go=&form=QBRE
A page from php.net is listed as the first entry, which is in my opinion, beats the result from Yahoo. What’s more, you can hover your mouse on each entry of the result page, a little link will appear on the side and you can use your mouse to activate it to show a preview of the page. I tested several queries and the previews are very accurate. The preview also shows other links on the page that are relevant to the subject, which help to decide whether this page is “click through worthy”.
I don’t know if Bing can dethrone Google on web search, and as long as Google continues delivering the relevant results it is hard for anyone to make a legit threat on its dominance. But MS seems to have some nice things going in Bing just off the bat. Since Google relies on its search engine for most if not all its revenue, MS has an advantage here to make some bolder move, and be more innovative, like a real decision engine that was just released: hunch.com.