Thursday, October 22, 2009

The New MSN.com or Bing.com

Yahoo isn't the only one looking to rebrand themselves. MSN.com has turned into Bing.com. Claiming that the nation suffers from search overload, Bing.com is the first ever decision engine. I'm sure you've seen their really annoying commercials, but is it so different from standard search?

From what I've seen there isn't much of a difference at all. The results display the same except for a tab with more info that appears when you mouse over the right side of a listing. I was going to take a screenshot of an example of it for you, but it disappears when I'm using my capture tool.

So the search is the same, but there are some features on Bing.com to help you waste your time.

The video page mimics Hulu.com with all the popular television shows. Below the shows, it displays current music videos.

The Image search displays the images related to the image of the day. Once you enter a keyword and search for an image it works the same as Google.

Shopping on Bing.com is relatively the same except for their Cashback program. When you buy items that have a cashback symbol next to it you can get up to a 20% discount. Bing.com will email you each time you earn cashback. You can retrieve your cashback cash 60 days after your purchases. You must have earned at least five dollars. They may have convinced me to do my online shopping on Bing.com.

Bing.com does have a neat feature on their travel search called Farecast. It forecasts your fare so you can plan the cheapest fare. The drawback is that your summer vacation might be in winter, because that's when the cheapest fare is. Likewise, if you must travel on a certain date for business or a wedding or something like that, the Farecaster is not going to help you.

Visual Search is another fun feature to use although it is nothing new. Don't stray outside the predefined categories or you will get normal search results not visual ones.

One last feature I will talk about before I send you to explore on your own is xRank. XRank shows what the popular search terms for the day are. You can look up past days as well. You can also check the popularity of your search terms (Hint to business owners).

I look forward to leveraging the MSN or Bing.com. I believe, although the search is the same, the new shopping features will bring online success to businesses that use MSN as channel to reach customers. WSI Internet Consultants know just how to get your company started, contact us today.

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