Have You Binged Today?

Microsoft’s new decision engine, Bing™, aims to help users make better and informed decisions by focusing on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.^[1] The decision engine is expected to roll out over the next few days and fully deploy worldwide on Wednesday, June 3, 2009. As of today, you can access Bing in it’s ‘preview’ mode and take it for a spin – and that’s exactly what I did.

The Bing interface is clean and boasts new features such as categorized search and web groups which makes it easy to navigate. For example, in a search for mobile phones, Bing provided categories at the top left of the page (also known as the Explore Pane) for mobile brands, a buying guide, service providers etc. Once you click on a search category and hover over a listing, you’ll see a a short excerpt from that page. This quick preview can help you decide if that’s the right landing page that you’re looking for. Bing offers other features such as Related Searches, Search History, and Best Matches.

I’ll be trying Bing out for the rest of the week and see what other features will be rolled out by June 3, 2009. How about you? What are your thoughts on Microsoft’s new decision engine?

1. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/may09/05-28NewSearchPR.mspx [↩]

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