Microsoft’s new search engine Bing excels at finding a good restaurant.
Unlike Google, which generally returns links to mere web sites, Bing crawls listings at review services like Yelp.com and CitySearch. It then summarizes the results and displays a scorecard for each, rating things like service, drinks, food, wait time, lunch offerings, and so on, all laid out in a neat comparative table.
Bing is also great at finding travel information. Activating the travel tab puts you in a full-service reservation system. From there you can book tickets and even get tips about when to buy to get the best price.
Wired.com was invited to test-drive the new search engine last week during its beta phase, under the old moniker, Kumo, and we discovered lots of little gems like these.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled Bing.com to the public on Thursday, as expected, at the All Things D conference in San Diego. It will go live worldwide by June 3.
But if Microsoft has come up with a clear improvement over Live.com — the also-ran search portal that Bing replaces — it doesn’t quite go far enough to make us feel that it’s time to dump Google.
