Microsoft Bing review

However, two other features have made it to prime time: Twitter and Wolfram Alpha integration. Go direct to www.bing.com/twitter, and you’ll find the trending topics with some sample tweets, but you can also search anyone’s Tweets directly by typing ‘twitter @xxx. (xxx meaning the person’s Twitter name’).

Wolfram Alpha searches are also now live in the UK. That said, it will only work on calculations that it knows to explicitly send to the Wolfram Alpha database, but at least Bing can now keep pace with Google for integrated calculations.

Conclusion

Taken as a whole, it seems more than reasonable to have taken Bing out of beta. Microsoft has clearly worked on usability, accuracy and speed, and in most cases it does as well as Google. Some might even find some aspects easier and more satisfying to use than Google, while there are those that are clearly not as effective.

The problem for Microsoft is that it’s clearly worked very hard to produce a search engine, that is, most of the time, a match for Google, but no more. For example, while we do slightly prefer Bing’s image search, and we admire the categories and filters, these are hardly major reasons to stop using Google. It’s more of a case that should you ever find it as a default, there’s no longer any need to cringe, and we’re sure that Microsoft won’t be sitting still from this point and that we can expect more improvements to keep up that pressure.

On that basis, that number two spot in search doesn’t seem too unrealistic a target.