Go Bing yourself!!! - A complete Bing Guide...
But you may not find all the feature in your country homepage, like in India also, very limited functionality is available to the users as of now and some really attractive functionality like Shopping, Travel, News etc. are missing.
But you can go to this Bing worldwide page and switch your region to USA - English and can see all the tabs now.
Some of the really wonderful features of Bing are :-
New Explorer Pane
The search results are categorised into various web-groups and are included on the left side of the search page (big deal, really!) e.g. a search for “Mercedes” will add a left Navigation pane with groups categorised by Dealers, Accessories, Jobs, Sales etc. followed by “Related Searches” which shows what others users are searching for related to your search. It also has a super cool search history tab that shows what you have searched in past.
When it comes to searching for names e.g. “Aishwarya Rai” the results lead you to web groups like images, posters, biography, interviews, quotes etc. It also shows the Xrank for the name which is basically just an index for popularity of the name.
Bing Travel
You just need to go to the Travel tab and input source, destination and date of travel; Bing will bring the search results from a complete mashup of travel related websites like travel sites, airways sites and various travel agents to serve you the best deals on the platter! It’s nothing revolutionary but Bing here is trying to establish itself as a single destination for everything.
Bing Travel is powered by Farecast technology which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008. Farecast uses a predictive algorithm to predict when and from where should users buy their tickets.
Bing Shopping
A search for Nokia will bring all Nokia Phones sorted by reviews, users ratings and expert ratings. People can also sort the results based on their prices and can see the prices, availability across various sites from the Bing search page itself. You can also get speciall offers like Bing Cashback going though the bing search page.
Bing Video Search
This is one the really cool Google killer feature of Bing according to me... Try searching for “IPL” on Bing and it will show you various videos on the search page and you can just start them by pointing the mouse over them! And you can see the videos from the search page itself! Might become too chaotic at times, but a nice little feature!
Now, this news has started some spicy controversies regarding ”copyright infringement” as Bing may also show copyrighted video on their search page, which they might not have rights over. Secondly, since Bing is a search engine it may not be blocked in universities, homes etc. and users can easily use it to see illegal content like porn which would otherwise be blocked.
Besides this there are lots of other things that makes it cool like Bing Maps and features like "Also on this page" menu when you hover over any search result is really cool.
If you search for a company stock (e.g. GOOG or MSFT), and Bing will show you a grahical representation of the company's stock on NASDAQ as the first result, Bing will automatically create a web slice for that company which you may then add to IE 8 and track the performance directly from the favorites bar. You need Internet Explorer 8 to try this feature.
There are some other coll features that will make your Bing experiance even better :-
Save and Email search results
With Bing, you can save your search history on to a local folder inside Bing or to your Windows Skydrive account. Alternatively, you may send your search queries to a friend via email or publish them on your Facebook wall via Bing. You’ll need Silverlight to share queries in Bing.
RSS Feeds of Search Results
Unlike Google or Yahoo, Bing offers RSS feeds for their web search results that you can subscribe to inside any feed reader. Your browser should be able to auto-detect the RSS feed of Bing pages or you can append &format=rss to any Bing search URL and convert it into a feed. This feature is not available for Image and Video search
Find Pages That Link to MP3 Files or Documents
Bing (and Live Search) supports a unique "contains" search operator that lets you find web pages that contain links to particular file types.
For instance, a search like susan boyle contains:mp3 will show pages that are about the British singer and that also link to MP3 files. Replace mp3 with doc to search pages that contain links to Word Documents.
Add Bing to FireFox
To add Bing to Firefox search just add this Firefox Add-one from here
BING = BUT ITS NOT GOOGLE
When i searched for my own name " Vaibhav Gera" it showed results with the word GEAR in it and also highlighted it, Is BING so dumb that it cant distinguish between GERA and GEAR... LOL [Looks like Bing team read this line Bing is no longer showing results for GEAR when i searched for Vaibhav Gera -- Yaa its really not Google because to make Google hear something you'll have to do a lot!!!]
BING has a tough road ahead after all fighting the KING of Internet Google will not be an easy job!!! The Road might be difficult to the Top but Atleast Microsoft is on the right trak for the first time...
Here are some posts that helped me in compiling this post :-
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