Like many others, when I first saw all of the blogs and promotional videos displaying Bing’s features, I was rather excited. The search results looked clean and the shopping / travel search systems looked top notch when compared to the likes of Google product search, overall an exciting product. Now that the dust has settled after the launch, is it still an exciting product? Yes, very much so…….if you live in the US!

As a UK search user I was bitterly disappointed to see that virtually none of the features available in the US are available in the UK. The Bing promotional video really caught my eye and shows some cracking features such as the travel and shopping search. However in the UK version these features are either not navigable to or have been replaced by external service. Shopping search is done by ciao, travel section isn’t linked to and even the maps are handled by multimap.com overall disappointing. For the UK they have essentially re-skinned live search and added a related searches feature down the left.

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