Microsoft’s Bing search engine is now publically available, allowing you to decide whether Microsoft’s latest efforts has the power to take on Google. Bing is available at www.bing.com and replaces Live Search. Bing is taking off in a big way in the United States. July market share averaged Bing at 16.28%, Yahoo at 10.22% and Google at 71.99% (statcounter.com). Bing will give Google some competition but, the verdict is still out on whether Bing will win over Google.

If you are still trying to decide for yourself which search engine to use, there is a great website that lets you type in your search and compares side by side Google Results to Bing Results. Visit http://www.google-vs-bing.com to compare.

The feedback from Bing users is positive.

How is Bing Different from Google?

1. Bing shows a preview of the web pages in the search results when you hover your mouse pointer at the right side of the search results.
2. Bing displays fewer results if it is certain that it has understood your intent. The search for “Facebook”, for example brings up just one result linking to the site itself.
3. Some search results are divided into categories. For example, if you search for popular musician “Brittney Spears”, you’ll get results in the categories news, images, songs, movies, biography, tickets and downloads. In addition, the search results show images, videos and popularity of the musician.
4. Wikipedia searches can be displayed inline in the search results without leaving the Bing site by clicking the “Enhanced view” link.
5. Bing features a different background image every day. The image contains special hidden hotspots that lead you to more information about the image. Maybe in the future this will be advertising?
6. Despite the background image, Bing’s homepage loads very quickly in your web browser because the search box and logo load first. You can turn off the background image.
7. Bing’s video search lets you watch videos without leaving the search engine
8. Bing offers specific health, shopping, and travel search engines, as well as instant answers to travel searches. For instance, the search “NYC hotels” displays a selection of hotels in New York City including hotel stars and prices.
9. Bing’s search history lets you return to your most recent searches of the last two days. This feature can be turned off to protect your privacy.
10. Some of Google’s features are missing, for example, Bing doesn’t seem to recognize misspellings and returns no results in these cases.