Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft, has been in the new here in the Seattle area. It has taken many of the current tools provided by Microsoft and brought them together as a 'decision engine'.
One area that is being highlighted is the Travel section. It is a new tool to search for air, hotel, cars, etc. It combines MSN Travel with Farecast. Here is more on Bing Travel.
Next time I travel I will give it a try. I did a couple of searches on more exotic items such as travel to Kota Kinabalu and I did not see any advantages over Google. I also noticed that Slow Travel is a little lower down on the search results when looking for 'vacation rental reviews'. But US travel did have more options especially combining with Farecast.
I have been playing with Bing for the last hour or so. I like it, I guess the techies for SlowTrav will have to do their magic with Bing as they appear to have done with Google so that SlowTrav posts gets to the top five or so listings.
Peter
Posts: 1632 | Location: Essex Fells, NJ and Longboat Key, Florida | Registered: 21 July 2002
Here's a review of Bing from WSJ columnist Mossberg. I do agree, the way it displays photos is pretty cool. But I hadn't noticed until mentioned in the comments that there is no advanced search options. I don't think everyone uses them but I've found myself using google advanced search for recent posts and limiting my searches to a specific site.
We've been discussing Bing in the technology forum but I thought I'd shortcut it to Everything about Travel. The Bing travel search engine is now where you find Farecast. Farecast is a tool for predicting airfares. It is best for US flights but I think they will be expanding for more International.
Has anyone else tried it? What are your impressions?
That is the url to the main search engine. On the side nav bar they have a link for 'Travel'. This takes you to their rebranded site which is a combination of MSN Travel and Farecast. It is similar to Yahoo Travel.
The picture of the two otters on the Bing home-page is, I believe, from the cute video of two otters "rafted" together as they float around their pool. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epUk3T2Kfno
That video was taken at our local Aquarium here in Vancouver.
It is offical - Bing will power Yahoo's search. I completely forgot that Google used to power Yahoo's search engine between 2000-2004. More on it from Mashable.
