Microsoft has launched www.bing.com, a new type of search engine that they prefer to call a “decision engine”. The software giant hopes that the replacement for Live Search (which was the third most popular search engine in the UK, behind Google and Yahoo!) will change the way people use search engines. By offering users greater options in the search results and helping them find what they are looking for quicker, Microsoft believes it now offers what internet users have been looking for.

Bing certainly looks different to the other search engines. The large homepage image shows their intention to stand out from Google by avoiding the use of big white spaces. Once you perform a search however, the look and feel is instantly familiar to anyone who has used a search engine before.

When it comes to features, changes include a list of related searches along the top left hand side (Google places them at the bottom of the results) and a nifty little box next to each search result that you can choose to pop-up, with further information from that web page and a list of other pages from that site.

At a first glance, the algorithm seems to be centred much more around local results. Microsoft has shown an interest in local search for some time, and it looks like this could be their bid for that market. Some of the results are a little questionable at the moment, but you can bet that a lot of work will be put into making this Beta release a very strong search engine in the near future.

Will Bing successfully change the way we search? Will it start taking market share from Google and Yahoo!? Time will tell, but with the Bing marketing budget rumoured to be $100 million, you can bet that Microsoft think so.