Bing is the search engine provided by Microsoft, that company's answer to Google and Yahoo. Microsoft has updated the website to optomize it for the iPhone, and so far it looks like the company did a nice job.
Go to www.bing.com on your iPhone and you will be redirected to m.bing.com and given a very clean and simple home screen on which you can type your search:
You can tell Bing your location (by address, zip code, etc.) and store multiple different locations as defaults, such as work and home. With this information provided, Bing will run a local search but also provide you with other tabs to easily run your search on the web, videos, images or news.
When you search the web and click on a link, you will of course see the website, but Bing also offers the option of optimizing the website for the iPhone screen and automatically focusing on the part of the page that you are most likely to want to view. Bing skews some of the images to make them fit on the screen and the result isn't always pretty, but if you are just interested in reading text, this gets the job done. You can also click on the page map icon to see a version of the website divided into sections, and you can tap on a section to change the focus of the optimized view of the website.
Most of the time, I would rather just view a website normally in Safari and then zoom in on the part that I want. But for some troublesome websites that don't format well on the iPhone screen, the option to optimize web pages for the phone might be useful.
Google is a great search engine that works great on the iPhone and is built-in to Safari, and I'm sure that I will still use Google most of the time. But it is nice to see Microsoft taking the time to format Bing for smartphones such as the iPhone. They did a good job, and I can see myself using Bing on the iPhone from time to time.
From what I heard, Bing comes from a partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo, since both companies were getting killed by Google. So while MSN search and Yahoo search are still out there, Bing is the primary focus of both companies in order to win business back over Google.
I agree with you, its a good attempt, but everyone is using Google now, and the only way that Bing will succeed is if GOOGLE gives people a reason to look for an alternative. I don't see that happening anytime soon
Posted by: Jonathan | November 04, 2009 at 09:04 AM