Para. 11: ... search box that likes to the search engine on the site itself.

Think that should say links not likes!

Works OK. I would have to try it more to see if I could be arsed moving from the Big G though.

You could use Bing, or you could install Snap's plugin for Firefox. It's not a particularly original feature.

I thought Bing was quite a clever choice of name... "... hang on, I'll search for it... there it is... bing!". Or in the UK case "beta bing!"

According to the stats at W3C schools it's now FF.

Bing actually works well for me and it shows my own sites at the top of a search so what can I say? Although I'm generally anti-MS, I'll give this a go for a while because I like to see more search engines and Google is starting to worry me.

Buggia, lol.

Bing looks good for previewing porn, no need for expense claim

You mention 'market share', by which you're referring to query share, but rather pertinent to this article is the fact that Live Search reached around 30% of searchers, compared to 90% or so for Google. While that's not massive, the discrepancy between searcher reach and query share suggested that any new MS search engine needed to be more 'sticky', and get people to return to it. Hence, I guess, the catchy brand, and the 'one-stop-shop' style approach to things like booking flights and so on.

One good reason to use bing is to reduce google's ability to keep tabs on us. MS seems to be more wary of upsetting their customers by retaining information on them, but time will tell.

Unfortunate that Microsoft chose to name their new search Best Match, the same as eBay's despised "unfinding experience" but it does seem to be bringing an increasing amount of targeted traffic to my eCommerce blog.

I tried it out and found that if I opened Bing in IE I got Bing Australia. If I opened Bing in Firefox I get Bing U.K. Twould seem sthat the only people who use Firefox, According to Microsoft, are U.K.ians.

That being said I still rather prefer Google, at least they know where I live.......mmmmmmm maybe not so good

Firefox has had add-ons that give you a preview of a web page for a long time. And there are ample websites to help you searching through restaurants, or whatever business yo are interested in. Some of these are quite good. So there is still nothing new under the sun.

But I guess it's ironic that the company that drives people crazy by forcing them to click and click and click before they can get something done on their local machine (are you sure you want me to do what you told me to do?) is trying to save us a few clicks on the internet by embedding external media sources, content previews and (heheh) wikipedia.

I'm just wondering how /fast/ bing is, compared to google. I'd think all those nifty previews eat bandwidth and server CPU. Also interesting that they feed the beta to the entire world sans USA. They get the Real Thing and we have to wait six to nine months. Well, at least we know where we stand, Microsoft!

Microsoft are so far behind in terms of search engines because it's too difficult to find the information you need.

I've tried using Live Search for all sorts of things from finding photoshop tutorials, to researching topics for my degrees and I just find it cumbersome to use, with little in the way of useful results.

I don't know why this is, but they need to get it sorted if they want to take on Google search. I don't really like Google that much as a company (in fact I prefer MS), but most people, including me will go straight for their search engine because at the moment it is the best for most types of search.

The term "Google it" is nearly always used these days rather than just saying "do a search".

i have used google for years even had a gmail account when it was invite only.

But lately microsoft are getting my attention

e.g. free push mail with live.com account (have a old hermes running WM6.1)

Would of prefered gmail but this actually seems to be doing quite well.

I do get a tad annoyed to the amount of comercial stuff i get in my google searches considering i dont really buy off the internet :/ if i do i go to names i already know e.g. argos cpc maplin.

If they can deliver decent resuts without to much crap for buying stuff i will be happy

Google is a automated shopping trolley now :(

It looks JUST like Google. Same layout, same text-ads column, same colours even. I think maybe Bing is just a very light frameset and some css.

If imitation is the finest form of flattery, MS just sucked Google's lolly.

It's early days but bing looks really good from what I've seen so far... and yes I do trust MS more than I trust Google. The problem really is that any search engine needs to reach a critical mass of users before it really explodes, in the days of the Google The Dominator(TM) that's harder than ever to do, bing might go end up as a footnote - yet another example of the better technology losing out to the market.

"Type "London weather", for example, and you get a summary of weather in London now and for the next five days."

Odd that the first hit on Google is exactly that.

Obviously bing searches google.

all these moments will be lost, like tears in the rain

For every website owner with legitimate content, there are dozens of frankly evil ones, who will try to misdirect web users onto their sites for any number of unwholesome ends. Gaming any primary route, that users rely on to find content, is about the easiest way for malicious websites to hoover up hapless victims. Successful search engines actively work against these efforts, and the more successful the search engine becomes, the harder this gets. The fumble over the porn previews was of concern because it was a side effect of how Bing was designed to work: it wasn't the result of someone actively targeting the feature. It reveals a niavety, on the part of the developers, that I do not think will prove resilient, against the jading experience of having to run a search engine effectively, against attackers with seriously bad intentions, for years, while trying to stay ahead of them.

Search is about much more than finding something that looks about right, and making a mashup of it. If more people start using Bing, then attempts to game it's search criteria will move into full gear, and at the moment, its search criteria do appear rather childishly obvious.

Google and Bing do not seem to get the date relevance of stuff.

E.g. if i search for a tech term on google or bing i may get a link to a forum that has not changed in 3 years ABOVE a more recent entry in another forum.

How relevant is not just a case of how many words match but how up to date.

Hmm.... seems like bing is just google in an iframe...

I've built three XP PCs this week in the UK and the PCs are all set to UK settings (natch) but everytime the IE8 setup runs through it defaults Bing to the Spanish version.

Donde esta UK version????

No, you may have read it wrong. The stats on their pages show the browser share just for W3Schools. It isnt an idication of overall trends on the Internet, it says so towards the bottom of the page.

I'd have gone with Ping :)

If I search for trim in both google and bing. Google's first result is the trim function in the php manual.

Bing favours trim.com the website of a brand of manicure products. The php function is 3rd.

Interestingly Google returns trim.co.uk (9th) before trim.com (10th) presumably because I am in the UK.

Bing looks pretty good, much better than the old live search. However just being good isn't going to make people switch from Google they need to be significantly better. I guess they just have to hope that they can gain market share by being the default search in IE.

The Google search is pretty good, but nothing's perfect and there's always room for another kick at the cat. Google's chief drawbacks are, as Lee Jackson put it, "the millions of results that take me to fake blogs, ebay pages, expired pages and or Chinese pages" and the simple fact that it's part of the privacy-invasive Googleplex. For the latter reason, I avoid the use of Google search these days, and use Google almost exclusively for Maps (which I do not enter search terms into) and Images, which I use to track down pictures of certain plants. Indeed, when Google took over one of the main blogging sites, I deleted my blogs and my account.

These days I use Ixquick for most searches. It claims not to retain your IP address (but that may be a meaningless claim), and is something of a meta-search engine. Good old Altavista is still out there, too, and I don't know how many others.

It seems to me that diversity is the key element to having a perfect world as far as search engines are concerned. There's more than one way to spider the web and more than one way to analyze and organize what you find, so the more the merrier.

PS: Re Google and privacy. It strikes me that the time is coming when the whole concept of "targeted ads" will have to be thrown into the trash barrel, along with Google's own propensity to spy on you, Phorm, Nebuad, and God only knows what other snooping systems. The simple fact is that "targeted ads" are INHERENTLY at odds with online privacy and it's time for everyone to realize this.