So they have just re-invented Windows Live Search with a new UI.

Big Whoop.

i give it about 3 weeks before people start to realise what a crock of shi-ummm, sugar it is.

That is, all except those who used Live before that, and Yahoo! before that. But they deserve to be burnt at the stake for being a heretic.

The Jesus Phone has spoken! Now spread the word!

The problem with Bing is that apart from the cideo preview it doesn't actually offer anything ground breaking and that is where it all falls down: People by nature are conservative and will stick with what they know, unless the "new" is so radically different that it becomes the thing to do or have (like the early iPods or the Iphone)

If I have a Ford and I'm happy then I'm not going to move to a Vauxhall if it offers me the same features for the same cost. I'll stick with what I know.

If I have a phone that does what I need it to then I'm not going to just swap it for another phone from another manufacturer if it doesn't offer me new features that really make me go wow.

And if my local pub can serve up 3 or fine real ales at a reasonable price and I enjoy the surroundings then why should I even consider walking further to another pub that offers me pretty much the same beer range.

So maybe MS need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a real "Google Killer" rather than just Live Search in a new coat.

Andrew Tyler 1 wrote: "The results it returns seem to be pretty much the same as Google"

Really? I tried it last night and the first thing I did happened to be an image search. Practically none of the results came even close to matching the search parameters. I couldn't find what I wanted on the first 5 pages, so I switched to Google (which ofc returned exactly what I wanted in the top row of results)

"The video search is a lot better though. I like the preview feature, which is actually pretty impressive". Yeah, it is quite good isn't it? The problem is that once again, the results I've seen were only vaguely related to my search criteria, so it's not exactly usable.

Which makes me ask - has this thing been tested? Is it supposed to return a load of crap instead of results?

It wont be long. Until we see the video preview thing on Google.

Then Bing will have no selling points.

Microsoft needs to stop trying to do EVERYTING and just focus on doing a few things. Those who do everything do nothing well. And Bing/Live Search is a perfect example. Google is no saint, but until someone else actually has a search as good as Google, I will be using it. I want results, not advertising blitzes. Bing/Live couldn't find the ocean if it was standing knee deep in water. I can find what I need faster with Google and Yahoo than with Bing/Live. Why waste my time just because it can play videos?

(Love the new icons! Suck on this!)

Yeah, after some more fiddling today the search isn't as good. Before, I had gone through and searched for every search I remember running on Google for the last week or so: "repair double hung window" and "cat diarrhea," for instance (both of which ruined my week), and it gave me the most useful sites I found through Google, but digging a little deeper into random, computer nerd centric things produced almost entirely useless results.

Anything that made me move away from Google would have to be substantially better, and to be honest, what I'm looking for usually pops up on the first page of Google results, so making anything substantially better would be difficult. If they could manage "as good," I'd probably be happy to use it if only to make Google sweat a little bit.

So.. yeah, I probably should have tried to break it more. I do like them video previews though. Even if entering "double hung" into a slightly schizophrenic video search engine isn't the best idea.

Sparky, Bing sends you to the Windows XP page on their second link, with SP3 and links to much more useful info than Google gives you on just the download page. (Admittedly, the first link instead of the second.)

For a regular consumer, Bing's results are a much better result, as long as they realize the first link goes to the Wikipedia entry for WinXP.

IMO Bing wins your comparison.

I have nothing relevant to say on this article. However, I did want to try out the new icons.

Well, apparently BING! has already been improved, or learns quickly. When I tried to use it right after it came out, "XP SP3" did not take you to anything relevant on the entire first page, let alone the second result. I would have been satisfied with the search result I just got when I repeated it today after seeing your post. I still would have preferred just the download page, but I can live with a page with links to the download. That first search was just so spectacularly bad I hadn't gone back.