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As promised last week, Microsoft has trotted out its new search engine. It’s called Bing and you can find it here. PCMag has a great review and slideshow of the search engine here. True to its semantic genetics (including the Powerset search engine that Microsoft previously purchased and incorporated), Microsoft is calling Bing a “decision engine” rather than a search engine. Bing offers suggestions for related concepts and information, with answers to inquiries, rather than just links to other pages, offered right on the search results page. You can get even more information from suggested links when you hover over a result entry. You can get “deep” links, such as search boxes for FedEx or UPS tracking right on a Bing results page. Bing’s pages are not spare, but can include images of current events, landscapes or other “bling” (sorry – couldn’t resist ).

Rather than review each element of Bing and how it handles matters such as travel, shopping, images and video and news, I recommend you go try it yourself. Check out the PC Mag article linked above for a comprehensive list of features and the page slide show. While many web commenters are echoing the famous refrain “it’s not a Google killer”, Bing looks to be a promising hike along the evolutionary path away from the popular-by-number-of-links search option.

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There are all sorts of reasons for attorneys and everyone else to be interested in what kind of information is lurking on-line about particular individuals. People get involved in business dealings and litigation, from parties to experts, from witnesses to jurors. Potential clients are on-line creating profiles and offering information about needs to be met. And attorneys who are sensitive to modern modes of communication are on-line, promoting their brands and, hopefully, following up to determine whether their on-line marketing is making the desired impression.

Enter Identify. Based on the Google Social Graph API, Identify is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to search of profile pages and track links.  When viewing a page, just click “control + i” and get a pop-up box showing connections from all around the Web associated with the person referenced on the viewed page. Primarily designed to profile pages, it can be used as well with web-pages with the proper coding and information.

If you have Firefox, you can get the plug-in here. Check out your own profiles and see how well you represent on the Web.

Hat tip to Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb.

Leave it to Firefox to come up with a way to have your cake and eat it too. Amidst the hue and cry over the last few weeks surrounding the announcement and deployment of Alpha’s computational knowledge-based search engine and whether it would topple Google from its thrown (a decidedly red-herring-esque question), Lifehacker reports on a new Firefox extension that embeds Wolfram Alpha results into your Google search results page. Author Kevin Purdy advises that the experimental Firefox extension is a bit glitchy and haphazard. Nonetheless, Purdy is correct that the extension is worth trying because “getting a second, nerdier opinion from Wolfram Alpha is just what you needed in some cases.”

Not to be outdown by the likes of Google and Wolfram Alpha, Microsoft appears to be unveiling its new search engine next week at the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things D tech conference in Carlsbad, California, according to Resource Shelf.

The engine’s code name is Kumo, but it is really a rebranding of Microsoft Live Search conjoined with its new semantic ally, Powerset. And guess what? It is going to help us find more relevant results! The screenshots over at All Things Digital / Boomtown show a clean, spare look. PC World reports a three-column search results page with useful tools like related searches, a “single-session search history for quick backtracking”, and other related categories tied to your search inquiry. PC World uses an example of searching for a recording artist with results that include song lyrics, tickets, albums and the artist’s biography. Or searching for a product with results including images, reviews and product manuals.

Will Kumo stand or fall amidst the search stars? Not sure, but I can say this: more semantic competitors add up to us edging closer to a truly semantic on-line world! Kudos to Kumo!!!!

Fascinating post by Louis Gray, over louisgray.com, one of my favorite blogs about all things Web and social media-related. Apparently, Microsoft hosted a get-together Tuesday evening about semantic search engine Powerset and its incorporation into Microsoft’s Live Search. One of the topics discussed was how search engine reviewers perform their “craft” and how ineffective their process really is in gleaning an understanding of this complex endeavor. And the effect of this inefficient review might be to sink the better option.

This result seems particularly true as search engines become more complex in design and practice. To truly understand how effective a search engine might be, one needs to spend some time with the engine, put it through its paces and delve deep into the results. “Teaching” search engines to “think” like humans takes time, and recognizing when the engine “gets it right” should also take time.

As I have said before here, when search engine’s compete to grab out attention, we the researchers stand to win the grand prize. In Louis Gray’s words, for Microsoft, “building the better mousetrap” will only be half the battle in the war of the ‘engines. Can’t wait to see the “results.”

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