BING! BONG?

It was in light of somebody asking me if I was able to see the new search engine by Microsoft called BING!

My first question is, "Why Bing?". Does it have to do with the abstract sounding "Wii" from Nintendo?

I tried it out and it was pretty interesting. It many ways it's a lot like Google in the layout save for the graphic banner residing at the top. The image search is interesting, no description at the bottom unless you mouse over the pic itself. Unfortunately, there's no "Remove this Frame".

I clicked on shopping, then took the tour, but there's no way to get back to bing.com itself from there.

Another interesting thing is the history of searches on the left hand side. I find that very useful because sometimes, you just want to go back to that last search that you thought was more effective than the one you just did.

Maps is interesting as well as Travel (it takes you straight to booking a flight). They have features from ORBITZ, but I'm wondering if they still have expedia.com underneath it all?

All in all, it seems that Microsoft is trying to consolidate all of its services in one large portal. Will they have developer tools too in light of all this? I wonder if some of the components are also developed in Silverlight?

In any case, try Bing.com for yourself and tell me what you think.

-eggBrain