Bing!

Bing is a new search engine created by Microsoft as the latest tool in its campaign to take control of the web. But can it outshine Google?

At first glance, Bing appears to be based so closely on Google that it's hard to spot any real differences.

The design itself looks like Google, despite the added background images. Yes, there's the search box. Yes, there's the go button. Yes, there's the links to other types of content searches, like image and video.

The returned results page is even displayed in a similar fashion to Google's results.

Functionally, Bing is slightly different, but still not enough to make much of a difference to users.

Searches for general topics like 'cars', 'dogs', or 'computers' reveal some slight differences in the order of the returned sites, but by and large they match fairly closely. No surprises there.

One interesting feature of Bing is the 'long description' text with sublinks that appears next to the search result when you hover your mouse over it. A nice feature, but is it a Google-killer? I don't think so.

A noticable ommission occurs when searching for something relating to a place, like 'Geelong Accommocation'. Google displays a map of local businesses using an embedded Google Map. Bing displays only the standard search results, no maps.

Maybe the similarities exist because Google has already discovered the best way to do search, and there are very few improvements that can be made by Microsoft or anyone else. But if this is the case then it begs us to ask the question: Why? If Bing is only a made-over version of Google, why build it at all?

Despite the similarities, Microsoft's pull in the market should not be underestimated. They own or have partnerships with several influential web properties and I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before Bing-powered search boxes (and Bing-powered ads) are added to all of those sites.

Whatever happens in the long term, search sites will remain the web's most-visited aplications and it shoulud be interesting to watch these two heavyweights battle it out.