Last week’s announcement of Bing, Microsoft’s new Search service, sparked huge wave of internet debates. There were more than 400 stories in the press on Bing since the announcement, with headlines in the Wall Street Journal’s Mossberg Solution column “Microsoft Effort to Best Google Yields Results” and “Microsoft Bing: Much better than expected” from CNET.  With already more than 16,000 followers on Twitter and 20,000 fans on Facebook Bing seems to be growing its popularity every day.

Is it a really Google killer or just a one month buzz?  Blogosphere is very divided on this question.  So, I wanted to add my 5 centes into this discussion.

First, competition is good, monopoly is bad. And 75% of market share is a monopoly. Period.  As I want Apple and Google to successfully compete with Microsoft in desktop and OS space, same I want Microsoft, Yahoo! and Ask.com to compete with Google in search space.

Second, surprisingly I was getting tired of old plane search paradigm nurtured by Google and was gradually moving to cool new innovative search provided by Ask.com. Microsoft’s Bing seems to me as an attempt to merge those approaches. Is it successful? We will see in a year or so. I had no trouble switching from Google to Ask and I am honestly would give Bing a fair try.

So, how Bing is different from Google?

Instant Answers: finds specific answers to informational queries, e.g. "2009 Audi A6" offers rich media and structured data including MSRP, MPG and listings at your current location and a general search term like “weather” yields a 5-day forecast for your location.

Search for “Audi A6” in Google and Bing:
 

 

... or search for “weather” in Google and Bing:

Search History: One of the features, I really like is search history. Bing keeps track of your entire search history on the left side of the screen, allowing going back really quickly.

Categorization: This is something completely new for search engines. Bing categorizes search results with the explorer pane and quick tabs. I am not sure how useful it is, guess I need to use it for a while to get the opinion on this feature.  

Best Match: delivers results with deep links and highly relevant information to help searchers to get the right information faster. Such as searches for UPS or FedEx.

Preview: enables searchers to find out more information about a site by previewing individual results on the results page to reduce back-and-forth searching.  This is one of my favorite’s features in Ask.com, so I was really pleased to see it in Bing.

So, in conclusion my advice is to give it a try http://www.bing.com/ and build your own opinion. Even if you don’t like it, this competition would force your favorite search engine to innovate and serve you better.