Bing – Mircosoft’s search engine has now become publicly available, and the onus is on you to decide whether it can take on the might of Google. Available at www.bing.com, this search engine replaces Live Search and is garnering a lot of attention. Microsoft is going all out to promote Bing; it is expected to spend an estimated $80 million to $100 million on Bing marketing. This search engine from Microsoft is expected to be a hedge against Yahoo and capture some of its market.

One thing is certain, With Bing firmly in place, Google would have to pull up its socks and keep innovating its search initiatives. There would also be some competition in the pay per click domain and Google cannot get too greedy.

Do you think Bing is different from Google? It is not dramatically different from Google; but some people have found its results to be stronger. The visible changes in Bing are listed below:

A preview of a web page is available when you hover your mouse pointer at the right side of any search result.

Fewer results are displayed when this search engine understands your intent.

Many a times, the search results are divided into categories. Your search for the popular musician Justin Timberlake could get you results in categories such as songs, movies, biography, wallpaper, and downloads. You could also get images and videos while using this search engine.

You can display the Wikipedia searches inline and you would not have to leave the Bing site. All that you need to do is click the “Enhanced View” link and you are done.

You get a different background image every day. There are special hidden hot spots in these images and you can click on them to know more.

It does not take much time to load the Bing’s homepage on your web browser. There is a provision of turning off the background image as well.

You could make the most of the video search option to enjoy the videos without leaving the search engine altogether.

There are special search engines for health, shopping, and travel – and this makes the search process more easy and hassle free.

You can return to the most recent searches of the last two days using the search history feature. If you want to protect your privacy, you can turn off this feature.

Bing does not recognize misspellings and returns no results for such searches.