Welcome everyone, to part dos of my semi-review of Microsoft's brand new search/decision engine. Yesterday, I had some positive and negative things to say about Bing. That trend shall continue with part 2 of my look into Bing.

Yesterday, I provided my thoughts about the front page of Bing and the search results. Today, we're going to take a look at the other features. Starting with the images search page.

I'll be honest, this is one of Bing's features they have me sold on. I can say without much doubt that I will be conducting my image searches through Bing now instead of Google. Why, you ask? The main reason is I really like the thumbnail layout that Bing provides. Instead of seperating results into multiple pages, all the images load up on one page. As you scroll down, more images will load. This makes image browsing much more intuitive, and this alone is enough to have me switching. There's also extra search filters that are a bit smarter (blasphemy?) than Google's image search.

Moving onto video search; I'm not sure if Microsoft is being ballsy or just really stupid. I have to say that their idea of providing the means to watch a preview of videos by just scrolling across the thumbnail is quite clever. While 'users' might find it convinient, it's the content providers that could be up in arms over this. If Bing is able to relay the general sense of the content, why would anyone click and visit the original source? I'm sure sites that have videos being shown on Bing are asking the same question --- which we'll lead to their lawyers asking Microsoft the same thing. Google sort of does the same thing, yet they provide the actual player that the content provider uses which provides a link back to the site.

Overall, there are a few features that Microsoft provides through Bing that make it something you might want to check out. Is it a Google killer? No. Can it still carve a small niche in the internet world? Absolutely. There are a few kinks to work out, but overall I can get behind the spirit of Bing. It already has a new an image search that I'll be using in place of Google images. That's definitely a start.

The ideas presented in the WebProWorld newsletter editor's note do not reflect the thoughts, and ideas of the WebProWorld community.

| JohnnyV |