Bing!

I do not exactly remember what my browser home page used to be before I switched to iGoogle. I am so used to it now, that I could hardly imagine any other gateway to internet, as iGoogle satisfied all my needs. But as they say in economics, your needs are eventually determined by the options you have, iGoogle appeared to be that one-size-fits-all solution for all my home page needs.

This notion changed when I tried out Bing. The huge picture, with some useful information tidbits was a fresh change (being an avid photographer, I naturally love those great shots). Whenever you launch your homepage and have few seconds to spare, Bing provides a good starting point for some quick learning about issues and places.

To continue from where I left in my previous post, the other features I like about Bing are

- a quick summary of the result (however, this is not so cool when the result page is image rich and does not have much text content. Flickr result page gives a blank summary)

- the image search has some interesting options (colors, layout, size etc.) in the left pane. I found the people option (just faces, head & shoulders) to be interesting. It would be great to have a feature of finding similar images (to find out who on the internet is resembles me). But this would mean bringing in state-of-the-art image search tools into a generic search engine. If you ask me, I would vote for it.

Bing is definitely an interesting product, people would be playing a lot with it, before deciding if it meets their needs or not. Or rather should I say, would Bing change the internet search needs of the webkind.