Kind of old news now, but the Microsoft new search engine went live on June 1st slightly ahead of schdule. Viral Tapara brought it up during the vista squad meeting on 27th May, and to be honest he made it seem so incidental to all the other stuff he was showing us (web accelerators in windows 7 for one thing) I kinda forgot all about it.
Initial impressions. It seems well though out and a lot easier on the eye (and the background processes of the brain) from their previous seach effort. It also seems to have some of the web browser accelerator features built into it, such as expanded preview information when you hover over links (this works in firefox as well, so it would seem to be the site not the browser doing this !).
One thing of note, all the predictive suggestions are displayed in lowercase, even if you are using uppercase or even block caps for the search string. I personally am ok with this as being in tech for a career I tend to use lowercase all the time anyway, except for people names. The site also has a mapping feature which unfortunately seems to be partnered with multimap, who I just am unable to read :o(
Given the richness of the interface there are not that many configurable options just yet. Number of results to display per page, language settings, moderator filter and the ability to turn predictive text on/off are about all right now.
I guess wether it suceeds or not will come down to them being able to offer something the others don’t. It is going to be a very hard habbit for me to break personally not to just open google for all my searches, but should bing sunddenly offer that “can’t be without” feature or functionality, I may have to force myself to make a concious switch.
