I have opinions of my own - strong opinions - but I don't always agree with them - George Bush
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Bing gets an update
INTERNET SEARCH ALSO-RAN Microsoft has released a bunch of updates to its Bing search engine.
The Vole's website claims that it has a "new fresh look" for Bing. Bing now has tabs that move "related searches" from the left sidebar to just under the search bar and there are some bigger fonts.
At the top of Bing pages are Quick Tabs, which highlight the best query relevant search results available in the search database. It also creates a tab for each category of results that best matches your query. The bigger fonts appear to be for the visually challenged.
There is also a new Bing Entertainment category that joins Shopping, News, Travel, and Maps. That will have four major sections - Music, Gaming, TV, and Movies.
The music section enables users to search for a song and then play that entire song and get the lyrics to the song, all from within Bing.
Bing will also allow users to play games. The Vole wants to provide detailed information on over 35,000 games, including in-depth reviews, cheats and walkthroughs.
The TV section will have more shows, better organized, and more HD, in short, a better TV experience for Bing. The content comes from Hulu, Viacom, CBS and other unnamed sites.
The Vole claims that Bing offers more than 1,500 shows and 20,000 full TV episodes, TV listings, and easy access to episodes, reviews, images.
There is apparently lots of movie information available in Bing, too, including visual search, customer reviews, in-line movie trailers, highlight videos, and one-click ticket sales. µ
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Bing still doesn't return searches as good as I can get from Google. I test them together every now and then. Google will returns better information and better sorted to find the stuff I need. Sorry Bing, you are just a minor bang.
Well then. Should you visit
http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
using Internet Explorer, you'll see a stealthy effort to install the Google Toolbar and the checkbox is selected by default. You don't get the same offer in Firefox.
In short, it's not just Bing and Yahoo! up to this sort of monkey business. They're all the bloody same, Google included: to succeed they need users, and piggyback installs is one of the easiest ways of achieving that.
It'll only be inmpressive if the Bing toolbar is no longer distributed as paarasiteware. You know: the way it is often bundled with applications which do not need it to work and to which it has no relevance, yet with the install option selected by default.
Bloody Yahoo also employs this lowest life form tactic as well, making Bing and Yahoo toolbars malware by definition (Unwanted and unnecessary application which tries to get installed by default)