Bing: Microsoft Prepares For War With A Revamped Search Engine (Screenshots)

I may be in the minority, but I think this is exciting. We need more competition in search. I'm not sure if Microsoft is the right company for the job, but I'm glad they finally seem to be taking search seriously.

I'm also glad they went with Bing and not Sift, as we bought BingSEO.com recently. ;)

I'm excited too, mostly to see what they did with the PowerSet technology.

It's different and I like the thesis behind it: "decision engine". A good way to understand search is to see how people make the decisions to go about what they're searching for. Keyword they start out with, its variants, the final answer/result, and what form of search they should be using. travel? local? image? etc. It's all going to come down to execution though (Cliche, but relevant here more than ever). If it sucks, then 80 mil in advertising wont work well. BUT if it is something that people have to say "yo, you NEED to try this", then things could get interesting.

Bing, like Wolfram Alpha, includes various web site functionality in the search engine itself.

I don't have much confidence in this approach.

looks like a portal type page is generated for each search. could be superior to google for shopping. though amazon already covers that base fairly well.