Microsoft officially launched their latest attempt at a search engine this week. This time branded as BING.COM, the search engine is a step up from their LIVE.COM (which now forwards to bing.com) search engine which they launched a while back as part of their “LIVE” set of services.

A standard web search reveals a lot of different, very useful information about your search topic. Of course you get the standard results which link to the sites on the internet, but they also throw other information at you like “Best Match”, related Images, and on the side bar they even list Categories that go along with the search. I did a quick search for iPhone ( hehe, top product from Microsoft’s top competitor ) and was impressed to see that the “Best Match” was in fact Apple’s website. There were a bunch of pictures of the iPhone, and down the side were listed categories such as “Accessories”, “Software”, “Ringtones”, etc which when clicked show more specific iPhone links related to the category.

The image search works well, and they have changed the screen layout around a little bit to make it so that you don’t have to leave BING.COM to view the images. Images are shown in a standard rows and columns table when you first get your results but once you click on the first image to view it, it loads the page that the image appears on within the right side of the screen and moves all of your image results to the left sidebar where they appear to be in an unlimited scroll section. You pick an image from that section and it loads the page containing that image in the right side. This is reminiscent of the days when frames were a popular way to divide up your web page.

The video search seems to work well also. I like that once you are presented with a list of videos that match your search term, clicking on one of the results starts the video playing right away. You have the ability to look through the video results without having to load a new page to view each one. This makes it quick and easy to find the video you are looking for.

Mapping is pretty much the same as it is everywhere. Type in a business name or address and the map appears in the box with a balloon that contains all the know information about said company or address layered over the map. One thing I was impressed with is that my street was actually on their map… although spelled wrong! Google doesn’t even have my street on their map so I guess I have to give points to Microsoft for that one!

Another section to try out is the news section. It works similar to a standard web search except that only search news sources so when your results come back they have the source listed right below the result so you know if it came from the “Globe and Mail” right away.

All things considered, BING.COM is an impressive search engine. I think all of the features above are available in Google though and I can’t see anything in BING.COM that is going to make people want to switch from their old Faithful Google to Microsoft’s latest attempt.

Maybe if Microsoft offered to pay everyone a dollar each time they did a search… that might work!