Disclaimer: It seems the “preview” we got of Bing, was Bing integrated with Live.com. The actual Bing.com might be different. Bing.com will be available to all on June 3rd.

Microsoft finally annonuced the official details of its new search engine. Originally codenamed Kumo, the rumors from earlier this week turned out to be true and the new search engine is to be called Bing. The public will have full access to the new search engine later this week. But have no fear! Your friends at Mark8t were able to a score a preview. The first thing we noticed is Live.com will be modified to work like the new Bing.com. Nevertheless, whatever it will be called, we can honestly say Google will finally get some real competition. We have been impressed by the accuracy of the search results and the enhancements Microsoft has made to Live. It is clear that Live.com owes a lot to Google, especially when looking at the color schemes for advertisements. Nevertheless, to really get an idea how far Live.com (and now Bing) has come, we decided to let you see for yourself with the below tour of  features (some are pre-Bing). Please note, as this is a preview, the final product released June 3rd and may be different….Now on with the show….

What are some of the lovely things we noticed. Live now uses Google style (colors) for their paid ads. Microsoft also  knows where you are searching from and offers us the local restaurants on a map. The main change is the fact result are on the right hand side. Using Google one is used to ads being there. Live also adds images results, much like Google has been doing the last while in its universal search. In our experience, Live is more consistent with this feature. Below, for example is a search for “Apples”. See how Google deals with Apples.

Also , you can also get extra context from any result by a quick  mouse over:

Live also adds information for Weather. Just type weather and you get your local results:

You can also get Sports results:

Compare this to Google:

As you can see Live.com is  just a tad more enhanced.

That’s not all. Bing/Live will also incorporate a Celebrity Rank algorithm called xRank. When you search on a celebrity you quickly see if your favorite celebrity is hot or not.

Click on the Celebrities name in the search result and see a celebrities xRank. It is roughly based on search popularity, and it includes info on related celebrities.

In terms of multimedia, the new Live.com also allows you to quickly play videos by a simply moving your cursor over a selected video.

For image search, Live.com makes it super easy, when you search on a term, you get the results page like you’re used to:

When you select a result, you can see it in the context of the page, but you also have all the other results on a menu to the left, so if the picture doesn’t work for you, you can quickly go tot the next one:

Live.com actually offers many more services (more than we can cover here). This is the full list:

-Web: Search the web
-Images: Find the pictures that you’ve been looking for
-Video: Find and watch the latest video clips
-Products: Find, research, and buy the products you want
-News: The latest headlines from near and far
-Maps: Where in the world is…?
-xRank: See which celebrities are winning the popularity race
-Health: Discover and act on health results powered by Microsoft Health Vault
-Local: Find businesses anywhere and see how to get there
-Farecast: Compare deals on hotels and flights to destinations worldwide

In the end, we feel if you give Live (Bing) a chance next week, you might be pleasantly surprised. We were impressed enough to chnage to Live.com as our default search engine for the time being. We plan to give it a real shot against Google (over the  next couple of weeks) and see how well it performs. We will report our findings in the near future. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about Bing,  get  more detailed information here and here.