I disagree. Normally, yes, MS seems desperate, however, I think realtime search is really needed, and this is going to be seen as an important development looking back 24 months from now.
Out of curiosity, I've been trying Bing out for a few weeks. It doesn't feel desperate at all; incredibly, it's actually good. And I've been surprised at how much I enjoy its well-chosen and often beautiful pictures of the day---as with (restricted) Twitter results, a tiny differentiator vs. Google, but I suspect an important one.
MSFT might, just might, not be quite as dead as we thought.
I second that. I've had bing on my work computer for the last several weeks, and google at home. I haven't missed google on my work computer. And I think the UI for bing is pretty slick; you hover over a link and see a preview.
A couple of times, I didn't find something in bing, switched back to google.... and couldn't find it either. So I guess you could say that, provisionally, I'm sold.
hey it works, before bing I used to go to yahoo as my 2nd search engine, now I go to bing.
It hasn't found any better results than Google yet, but the interface etc, makes it much more useful than Yahoo.
I don't see any search engine replacing Google for me though, its just too ingrained in me. And then there is the firefox aspect, where my first search pretty much goes to Google by default