Bing is technically still in its preview state, but if you hold any Microsoft stock, you have to feel good about being ahead of schedule.  Especially in an Internet world where things move at a Google per second.  Before I get tons of hate mail, I really do know that 10 to the power of 1o0 is correctly spelled googol, but that  isn’t quite as fun now is it?

Before I digress again, what about Bing?

Bing was supposed to go live on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009, but our research shows that everything is lit up and live as of June 1st.  When you visit Bing.com, what you’re searching for determines what Bing displays on the left side window.  If I search for Seminar Direct,  the left window displays related searches about financial seminars and then another section that shows my search history.  In the main window, it shows Seminar Direct above an indexed authority type listing with 9 related links including free seminar calendars, FINRA seminars, lead generation mailers, mailing lists, newsletters and company.

When I search for financial seminars,  related searches provides an interesting list of relevant searches and another list of items in my search history.  Kind of kool actually and very intuitive.  While the results are very similar to those of Google, the layout seems to somehow instantly make more sense.  Going back to Google gave me that sort of “not so fresh feeling.”  Those of you that have followed me over the years know that I am a big Google guy.  That hearkens me back to the day I had breakfast with some of the key Google people who told me they “worked for Google” and I silly enough to ask, “What’s a Google?”  Oh how I wish I would have stayed a little longer at that bed and breakfast and paid some more attention to the geeky Google couple staying there with us.  My apologies for another digression…

Instead of blogging on and on about Bing, get out there and try it for yourself.  Search your name, your company’s name, Seminar Direct, financial seminars, your favorite restaurant, your favorite band or my friend Stephenie Meyer (scary author of everything Twilight).  Congratulations Stephenie on your complete and total domination of the MTV world via the MTV movie awards last night.  Who knew that shiny vampires that can “ball” would be so huge?  Twilight is now so big that you probably won’t talk or want to see me again.  Keep the faith sister.

Bing’s natural results get divided up according to the links and window on the left side.  In some ways, this is very similar to the approach that Google added recently with their new “search options” feature.  It allows the users to control the results in a very similar way, but their approach is really unique and different.  They have basically taken some of the recent advance in Google and simply improved them, elevating the total search experience.

Standby because we’ve only had one day to play and Google isn’t going to just sit back and play nice, there will certainly be a counter-punch coming soon.  When it lands, I’ll be the first one to say, “Ouch, that’s gonna leave a mark.”