Microsoft's Bing: Life-Saver, or Big Brother?

By Neal Colgrass, Newser Staff

Posted May 30, 2009 6:07 PM CDT

(Newser) – Reviewers say Microsoft's new Bing search engine—still not officially released—is great for shopping and answering tricky questions. It's also Big Brother in disguise:

"There's much to like," writes Mike Elgan in PC World, except Bing's top search matches—chosen by Microsoft, not popularity rankings. "It's always easy to have someone else choose your values and make your decisions. But is that good for society?"

Michael Muchmore embraces Bing's inner Big Brother in PC Magazine. The search engine's design digs up sites you can trust, he says—perfect for crucial health questions.
On CNET, Rafe Needleman praises Bing's formatting of movie listings, weather, travel, and product reviews. He also likes the text pop-ups that appear when the cursor hovers over search titles.
"There’s a glimmer of something better than a search engine" in Bing, writes Ryan Singel on Wired—namely, great restaurant and airline searches. But he calls the interface confusing and local searches "not very interesting."

In this image provided by Microsoft Corp., a screen shot of the Bing search engine is shown. (AP Photo/Microsoft Corp.)

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Microsoft to Google: We Don't Copy, You Copy

Bing execs angrily deny cheating charges

Twitter Ekes a Profit for 2009

$25M search deals with Microsoft, Google push it barely into black

Microsoft Searches for Cause of Bing Outage

Failure related to internal testing after maps rollout

Microsoft's Bing Maps May Beat Google

Innovative integration and photo features make beta worth a test

Free Holiday Airport WiFi From Google, Microsoft

Fight for market share finds willing fodder in snow-delayed fliers

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