Microsoft and Yahoo jointly announced on July 30 that they two have reached a ten-year-long cooperative agreement on search and advertising, though which, Microsoft will become the technical supplier of Yahoo’s search business, while Yahoo will exclusively take over the world-wide advertising and marketing business of the two companies. Based on the search technology provided by Microsoft, Bing, the search engine, Microsoft is now launching its search engine brand and the results on the search page of Yahoo is starting to shift to Bing.

Bing is a search engine that provides overall services, the general web pages, pictures, videos, maps and information search. The main improvement made by Microsoft is reflected on users’ operation. On the left side of the search results, there is a list of search settings; a click at one of the search results, you will see a list of pictures and you could choose the views. Not long after Bing went live, Baidu.com did the same thing. The video search of Bing is also quite distinctive; put the mouse on the preview picture of the search result, and you will see the video extracts automatically produced, ensuring you the very right result you are searching for.

One of the praiseworthy services of Bing is the map search; and its public transport transfer service is even more precise than Google Map, more available routes and less footing.

But for the moment the search results of Bing are not that satisfying. In Chinese-language search, the ranking order of the search results of Bing is more closer to pageviews, unlike Baidu.com, which is supported by date from baike.baidu.com and zhidao.baidu.coom and ranks the order through bidding. When it comes to intellectual knowledge, both Bing and Goole lag behind baidu.com. As for music, baidu.com wins a mass of users and search flows through its mp3.baidu.com; Google, through its cooperation with top100.cn, also succeeds in original music downloads, at the price of large amount of money, though; but Bing now has not taken any steps in music.

Google challenges Microsoft with its Android to beat Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, with its Chrome to beat Microsoft’s IE browser, and with its Chrome, the personal computer operating system that startled the whole IT indusrty of the globe. While what Microsoft takes on Google is its Bing, Office online and Azure. Actually it will be the computers all over the globe, the internet and mobile end-users who benefit a lot from the fierece competition between the two giants, and Bing is just a small part of it.