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I was fairly skeptical about Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing. After looking it over, however, I’m no less than impressed. Not only is it user friendly, but it’s also eye-appealing.

The first thing I noticed was the high-res background image with 4 clickable “hot spots” on the Bing.com home page. Rolling your mouse over one of these hot spots displays an information box with content specific to the current image and a related link. You can also view previous images using the navigation buttons in the lower right corner. However, I did notice that after navigating to a previous days image and clicking a related link on a hot spot, when I returned back to the home page it did not re-display the image I was viewing but instead displays the current days image. This makes it cumbersome to explore the hot spots from prior days.

After checking out the Images area of Bing, I then checked out the videos section. Here is where I found the main improvement over other search engines I’ve seen. Typing in a subject gives you pages of video thumbnails and if you roll your mouse over a thumbnail, the video begins to play in the thumbnail space with full audio. Now that’s cool.

Ever wanted to check traffic before a road trip? Just enter the word “traffic” with your city and state and Bing brings up a map with current road hazards, construction zones, and traffic conditions. While the mapping software did contain much the same features as others, I did find that the Bing.com maps were easier to read and navigate than maps on Google or Mapquest.

I’ll close with one additional feature I liked (and even signed up for). This was the Bing Cashback program – a simple incentive to use Bing.com. It’s easy, really. You get a Cashback account from Bing, locate Cashback stores, make a purchase using your Cashback account, you can then see the Cashback rewards earned from your Cashback account page. It can take up to 60 days to get the money back from a Cashback purchase, unless you sign up for the QuickCash program. The difference being that you have to use PayPal for your purchases and to receive your Cashback payments.

I’m looking forward to checking out everything else that Bing.com has to offer.  In the meantime, let me know what you like (or don’t like) about Bing.