A Guide to Using Bing

Bing is Microsoft's foray into the search engine business, with a
fully customizable home page that has explosively-rich colored
pictures in high definition, with little factoids hidden like the
"Easter eggs" from video games on the pictures. And this is just the
home page, where you
decide what you are going to do. Bing is feature rich and
aesthetically pleasing, and has many great features that start with
the amazingly crisp and beautiful pictures on the home page, of which
when you scroll the cursor around, you will find those hidden "Easter
egg" factoids. A guide to using Bing would start with the home page's
options.

On Bing's home page, the user has the choice between the "Bing", "MSN"
and "Hotmail" links on the top, left-hand corner of the picture. The
Bing link will be inactive, since that is the page that you would
presently be on. Clicking on MSN takes you to MSN's home page, and
clicking on Hotmail takes you to your MSN email page, MSN's Windows
Live, where one Windows Live email address allows you to show all of
your emails on the one page. Sign up, include all of your email
addresses, then enjoy seeing all of your emails on the one page. At
the far-right side of Bing's front page, the user can choose between
the "Make Bing your search provider", "Sign in", "Canada" and
"Preferences" links (for those of you in other countries, "Canada"
will be your country).

Selecting Bing's "Make Bing your search provider" link will turn your
search engine box use the Bing search engine, as opposed to the one
that you had been using before selecting the link, and once selected,
the link will no longer show, unless you chabge preferences and
deselect Bing's search engine. Selecting the "sign in" link takes you
to the MSN Live sign in page. Signing in keeps your searching
preferences saved and your email open.

Selecting the link that is your country takes you to Bing's search
engine for your country, and selecting the Preferences link takes you
to the Bing preferences page, where you can change your preferences
for searches. Your preferences include;

A. General Settings. Apply to all of your searches.

1) SafeSearch. A filter to filter out adult-oriented pictures, text
and video from your search queries.

2) Location. Allows you to input a geographical area, by city and
State (or Province), or by Postal Code. Here, you should enter either
where you live or where you are researching makes sense for logical
choices to change the geographical area to. Searches relevant to the
area
selected will be given priority in the returns.

3) Display. Select the lanhuage that you want the searches to be
performed and returned in.

B. Web Settings. Settings that apply solely to your Web search queries.

1) Results. You can choose how many results are returned per page.
also has a box to select if you want to have all links opened in new
windows.

2) Search Suggestions. Selecting the box will enable search
suggestions, which change as you type, offering the most logical or
most frequently selected sites related to what you have typed into the
search box so far.

3) Search Language. Narrow your search results by selecting one or
more languages that the search engine will use for it's search.

At the bottom of the Preferences page, you can select the "restore
default settings" link to change all of the settings to the way they
were when you first opened the Bing Preferences page.

Bing's search engine box, located near center of the page, has a few
links over top of it that will narrow your search results even more,
thereby giving fewer results to pour over. You can search the Web, for
Images, Videos, News, Maps or "More". Selecting the "More" link adds
xRank and Translator to the options. xPage is like pagerank, where it
shows what and who the most people are searching for. Translator
instantly translates everything into the chosen language.

On Bing's home page, for those of you who are blown away by the
beautiful and crisp pictures, you can browse through a set of
pictures, by selecting the little arrow keys at the bottom-right hand
corner of the picture. Each picture has it's own hidden factoids, so
scroll your cursor over the picture, and learn more than what you had
intended to.

Enjoy Bing! It will change the way you search for information on the Internet.