Very soon (in the next week or so) Microsoft will rebrand and enhance their general purpose web search service. It will be named Bing. This article takes a look at one of the designers of Bing, Brian MacDonald.
The update consists of a new look, a new name, and new capabilities for the product. And in the process, Microsoft hopes it will also get a fresh start in what has thus far been a painful journey.
Several of the features are things championed by MacDonald. In particular, the new engine has a left-hand navigation pane for moving among different types of searches. Kumo also breaks a search query down into a number of possible categories.
When one hovers over a particular result, they get a pop-up window with more information, such as the query terms in context on the page.
In other cases, Microsoft is bringing more information into the results themselves. Type in "Amazon" and one will get not only links to that Web site, but also the company's hard-to-find customer service phone number. A search for UPS will let one track a package directly from Bing.
FreePint Shop:
VIP LiveWire:
