Searching for more
Microsoft has announced its search engine, Bing, has now moved out of its ‘beta' phase and, to celebrate, has given the UK a site of its very own.
Bing has been in public beta for the past five months, as is the current Microsoft M.O., during which Microsoft has been analysing usage patterns and so on. The UK version is apparently designed to give us the most relevant results, including unique imagery and information ‘hotspots'.
Ashley Highfield, VP and MD for consumer and online at Microsoft UK said: "Bing is ready for the UK consumer, with our revolutionary way of searching the Internet proving very popular. Features such as categorised search, Twitter and visual search, are providing a different and intuitive experience, and are enabling us all to make informed decisions and discover more of the web - faster."
We wrote about visual search a couple of months ago and it seemed like a promising idea, so we tried looking for a UK sports star to see if the same visual search options had become available over here. As you can see from the screen-shot below, there are some useful links down the left hand side, but not visual search. Also, Bing for Twitter still seems to be in beta.
UPDATE - 12:15, 13 November 2009: A bit more playing around revealed some quite cool visual search functionality, including the ability to list football players by categories like transfer value, but getting there wasn't an especially intuitive experience.
