If any of you actually pay attention to the technology news yesterday (or actually used Live Search), you might have noticed they Live Search is no more, and been replaced with Bing, Microsoft’s new technology aimed to compete (and kill) Google.

Now the first time I heard this I thought of a lot of perverted things, much like when I heard of Google, but getting past it, I am trying to figure out why the change, why call it Bing? Does Microsoft actually want people to walk around and say “Just Bing it.” I mean it is one letter off from Bang, which makes me want to turn Bing into a sexual innuendo as popular as “bang” but then Microsoft would probably change the name again.

First starting with the start page, we get some random nice picture with random facts about the picture. Whoop-fucking-diddly-dee. I am not sure if this is suppose to add an ambiance or something in that nature, but I find it annoying only because it distracts you from the task at hand, which is search and researching. Anyone with ADHD might need to search for something and be so amazed by the picture they could forget what the hell they were doing. If I ever want random knowledge, then I will gladly get lost on Wikipedia.

The next thing is Bing “Preview”. What the fuck does preview mean? Is preview the new Beta? When I think of preview, I think of movies, you know, couple of minutes to make you want to pay to see the whole damn thing. Is this a preview? No it is a god damn replacement. I am not sure what is going on with the web developers today, but Beta was the new cool thanks to Google, and I sometimes think that Microsoft is trying to replace that with ‘preview’ only because my Mesh account is ‘tech preview’ (Or was, now it's beta).

I don’t think I need to comment on the icon.

Then there’s the name, what I touched on before… I guess I can’t really complain that it has changed its name 3 times (MSN Search -> Windows Live Search -> Live Search -> Bing) in a matter of about 3 years. I mean, I changed my .com twice in two years.

So how does it par up to Google? Truth is, to me, just another search engine. I haven’t notice any difference with Google except for the search history. But it really kicks ass is the video and image search, I think I might just replace Google with this.

The image results allow you to continue going through the list without having to go to the next page, I cannot argue with that, because of how long it takes me to find a simple image.

Then we have the video section which is also kick ass, because when you roll over the video with your mouse, it actually plays a short clip of the video (or a “preview”) making it much easier to find on.

As for all the other features, I really don’t use them that, much in general. Like shopping, I get a bunch of links for Bing cash back, not sure what that’s all about, nor am I interested in it because it would require me to *gasp* sign up for something, meh…

Overall, I think that Bing is kick ass for media, but for basic searching, I will stick with Google.