So, it seems that BING is making an impression in the US – comScore reporting as much as a 3% increase in the two weeks since its launch.
It will be interesting to see if this growth is sustained, or rather whether the £100million investment rolls on and on to fuel the hype of the new ‘Decision Engine’. CEO Steve Balmer suggested that MS are prepared to offer up 5-10% of its operating incoming in search over the next 5 years (possibly a staggering £11billion!) and today at Microsoft’s European search summit MS has boldly vowed that they will be the best UK search engine – quite a statement eh!

I took 5 minutes to have a scout around BING; here are some of its nicest features that I’ve noticed.

•    Search

•  Realted search, clear and logical – not too sales driven
• Introduction of categories in the linear results - Apparently to combat the huge drop off of click through rates post position 5 that Google experiences, Bing seemingly offers a more enriched list.
• Importantly – result quality seems good.
  

•    Image search

• Select by size, layout, colour, style and people – and from my test they all seem to work, makes Google’s colour selector look a bit naff!
• Viewing options on how many images are on a page, nice smooth switch over of formats
  

•    Related searches

• They seem logical and unobtrusive
• You can turn them off if they annoy you!
  

•    Video

• Roll over snippet functionality – gives you a small preview of the video in question (although this could reduce CTR on query based searches)
• Again the plethora of search filters are welcoming and useful i.e best match or most recent
  

•    Shopping

• Bit of a fail – shoots you out to Ciao! Which just isn’t as nice? Still it’s a reputable partner, although the introduction of flashing banners, adsense and tags like ‘earn money for reviews’ removes some of BING’s simple allure.
  

•    News

• Limited, but hey it’s only in beta – expect more to come in this area
  

•    Maps

• Nice link through to Multi-map – still not Google maps is it!

Follow Microsoft’s search summit on twitter hash tag #badabing.