Microsoft Launches Bing: Search Engine? No, a Decision Engine

Microsoft has launched Bing, its "decision engine" in preview.
I've been playing with it for a bit- it really comes into its own as a shopping tool, but has not really brought anything up that Google hasn't when I search for news or individual points of info. Also, its user interface is... well, it's Google, isn't it? Except with some stock photography in the background.

The video-search functionality is not too good, though: when I search for "Eminem Bruno", the Bing results are meme-proof, not pulling up any content that actually references both celebs, never mind the MTV Movie Awards fracas.

In terms of straightforward search, it's okay for shopping, I guess: Bing found plenty of results for "canon nikon", pulling product comparisons between the two camera companies off to the left (how pertinent could they be, though, when I didn't specify camera type?), while Google keeps product comparisons in the main results-page area.

Earlier: Microsoft will announce the launch date for their new Bing search engine... but Microsof'ts not calling it a search engine-- they'd rather call Bing a "decision engine", since it's meant to categorize search results in a qualitative manner.

While it's tough to see Redmond actually beating Google at search, the sofware giant is spending around $100 million to make sure everyone knows about their new toy, which is a major upgrade to the existing Live Search. The project was previously called Kumo; you can check out a video demo on the actual site, but you can't play with live data quite yet.

The question on my mind was one of reliability: despite how cool I find Microsoft products, their real-world performance never lives up the hype. I'm clearly not alone on this: