by Robyn Kirkey Walker

Created on: June 23, 2009   Last Updated: June 30, 2009

Microsoft's new venture is the website cleverly named "Bing." Bing has many uses. To reach its full potential, Microsoft is actively promoting their new website. It is much more than a search engine. On the surface, it looks like nothing more. In its essence, it probably is nothing more, but it is actually much more and consumers are going to benefit from its many uses for years to come. The innovation comes with the combining of Ciao.com and Live Search. Many Ciao members are a bit disgruntled since the Bing site does not offer any of the same compensation for review writing. With that said, Bing does have its promising points. Not only promising but potentially fun.

On the home page there are six tabs that may be clicked on besides the search box. These tabs include, images, videos, shopping, news, maps and travel. Click on one of the tabs and many of the top search options is shown. For instance, if you press the videos tab, featured shows is revealed as well as the top music videos and most watched, which is located at the bottom of the page. Of course there is an area where you can search for a specific video.

There is an interesting feature when the shopping tab is clicked. Bing offers big rewards on shopping for your favorite products. The cash back program promises to be beneficial to the modern day consumer. When you shop using the Bing search engine and you give them your email address, you will be set up for cash back on your purchases. The catch to this is you may ask for your cash back 60 days after your purchase and only if you have more that $5 accrued. Also, you can only get cash back when the cash back sign is shown. Really, this is the same as Livesearch cash back but now it has a different name. So if you used it before then you will understand the new cash back site.

You can also join the Bing community. It is basically a place to write blogs. There is no compensation for writing the blogs from Microsoft but you can share information and reply to users blogs. This may be a good place for business owners to set up their blogs . It is free advertising and also makes it much more interactive.

To sum it up, Bing.com is no google.com. It has its own charm and potential but for now the loyal google web searcher will most likely remain a loyal google web searcher. Don't let that stop you from checking it out, though. You could decide that this is the site for you. Start a blog, do some shopping, Bing!

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