Bing is online a full 3 days before the scheduled launch date; a surprise leap of faith very uncharacteristic of Microsoft. That said, the search engine is “in Preview” mode at www.Bing.com and Live.com continues towards its inevitable demise on June 3rd when I expect the address will be redirected to Bing.com.

A screenshot of the Bing preview home page (the Canadian edition)

I spent a little time on Bing.com and I challenge you not to be at least a little impressed! Might Microsoft have actually pulled off a good product?

It is late and I haven’t done a lot of searching but so far I am very impressed at how accurate the search engine appears to be. I am especially impressed with the image search options. In particular the ability to show only images with faces – nice touch! They also cleverly made the image results never ending… they just load and load and load on demand as you scroll down the page – no more clicking to additional pages.

Anyway, I hope to have a better review of Bing soon. For now please check it out and let me know what you think. Perhaps Bing will earn Microsoft a more significant percentage of the US search market (Live.com sits at only 10%).