Microsoft releases Bing.com

www.bing.com

So, it seems Kumo is actually Bing, but there are some features that I’m not seeing in Bing yet as per my previous reference to the screenshot of an internal beta named Kumo at Microsoft. Not sure at all whether this was the same project, but there are some similarities.

It looks pretty nice, clean, fast and user friendly. I also like the excerpt feature that shows a small snippet of the website content when you hover to the right of search results.

Further if available they show related searches to the left of the results, which I think is pretty cool to quickly zone in on alternate queries that could give better results.

In fact searching for ‘South Africa’ produces alternate suggestions like ‘Map of South Africa’, ‘Johannesburg’, ‘Cape Town South Africa’ (Good to see we feature etc. I like…

Another hidden feature you’ll find under extras (link top right) where there’s a link to Bing Community Beta, which looks pretty boring. Can’t really see anything new and innovative there right away.

Results are pretty fast, but will it trump Google? Not sure. If they open up their advertising system globally, I believe they will have much bigger uptake. Since publishers are making money from Google, they will stay loyal.

Come on Microsoft, give your publishers 30% of advertising revenue and see what happens!!

The question is, what could any new search engine possibly do that would make users move from Google other than pay them to do so?