Apparently, Twitter is making waves with Microsoft in ways that you may not consider. Yesterday Mary-Jo Foley of ZDNet reported about some of the tweets coming from the annual Microsoft product demo event (and pep rally – her terminology) held at Safeco Field in Seattle. About 20,000 folks attended and were leaking some info (not much but some) about the possibility of Bing 2.0 as early as this fall. Oh boy, I can’t wait!

Foley says

Based on a handful of Tweets I’ve seen so far, meeting attendees (including those who are watching remotely) have seen a demo of Bing 2.0. At least one Tweeter claimed the new update of Bing is going to be rolled out the week of September 14.

Foley’s attempts to elicit some official response from Microsoft came back with nothing to support the Twitter rumor mill. The MS spokesperson said

“We’re very excited about some of the new Bing features set to roll out over the next few months, but have nothing to announce today.”

Yawn! Honestly, if I were Microsoft and I had some new features for bing that were even introduced using the old Google trick of slapping “beta” on everything, I would be throwing the kitchen sink at the marketplace. Microsoft actually created a wave in the search industry that has not been seen in quite some time unless it was Google as the source. In order to continue the momentum that was created, Microhoo, or whatever you want to call them, should be just throwing it all out there. If they don’t do something soon they stand to lose the momentum created by bing’s roll out and their big splash could easily slip into the category of a footnote in the timeline of search.

Let’s use this opportunity to check in with you Pilgrims to see where you are on bing now that we are three months removed form the launch. Do you use it? Do you care? Is it competitive with Google. I’ll get it started by saying that I have not even given it a real “look see” yet because Google is my search choice by habit. There is too much to do in a day to sit around and wonder if bing is any good or not. I hear arguments on both sides of the coin but nothing has been compelling enough for me to make a switch or even consider it. Your thoughts? Maybe you can tweet Steve Ballmer from your iPhone to see if his head explodes.

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Microsoft on Thursday took the wraps off Bing, the rebranded and rebuilt search engine formerly code-named Kumo, designed to replace Live Search. It’s a solid improvement over the previous search product, and it beats Google in important areas. It will help Microsoft gain share in the search business. It’s surprisingly competitive with Google.

Bing isn’t available to the public yet, but you won’t have to wait long. Starting on June 1, some users will get Bing search results from Live Search. On June 3, we’re told, Bing will be Microsoft’s new default search. We got early access to the service. Here’s how it looks.

Hands on

In search presentation, Bing wins. It uses technology from Powerset (a search technology company Microsoft acquired) to display refined versions of your query down the left side of the page. For example, I searched for the game “Fallout 3″ on Google and Bing. While Google gave me good results, Bing gave me a menu of “related searches,” that included Walkthrough, News, and so on.

Bing also pop ups an excerpt of the text on a search result if you hover over it. This saves a lot of time if you’re not quite sure if you want to follow a result.

In the content of search results, Bing is not consistently superior to Google. In many searches I did (not the sample searches Microsoft sent me), the Google results were more relevant and useful. Not by miles, mind you, but in many cases Google delivered the goods just enough better than Bing to make me question the wisdom of adopting Bing as a replacement search engine. Just one example: Searching for “Best house paint for humid climates” gave me better advice links at the top of the search results with Google than with Bing.

When searching for product reviews, Google’s search result pages were mostly better than Bing’s — although, again, not by a lot. However, Bing also collates user and expert reviews on many products, and this gives you a great overview. This feature doesn’t always show up, though; and I wouldn’t even have known about it had it not been for the Wired review of Bing.

When you want to shop for an item, both services have very strong “shopping” tabs that organize results well. Google gives you seller ratings, which Bing doesn’t. But Bing offers a cashback program, which is hard to beat.

And in some searches, Bing won on results outright. When searching for “Facebook sandberg” on Google, the top link was a story from 2008. On Bing, the top item was “News about facebook sandberg” with three sublinks to very recent articles. When searching for “Obama Supreme Court,” Google did show news results, but the top link was a day-old story. Bing’s was from 32 minutes ago.

To be fair to Google, you can also click through to Google News on any result and sort results by date. But that’s extra clicks. Bing is more aggressive about including news.

All search engines have their strengths, and many of Bing’s lie in areas where Microsoft has its own content companies. For example, Microsoft owns the airfare prediction service Farecast, and it includes Farecast buying advice whenever you search for airplane travel. Bing also displays some medical data inside the search engine itself.

Bing also does very well in at least one area where Google should do better. The video search result page for “Thomas Jefferson” in Google gives you a vertical list of videos. On Bing, you get a big grid that’s easier to scan, and a list of related videos on the left for “George Washington,” “James Madison,” and so on. The search results are about equivalent, but Bing’s presentation is far superior.

You should use Bing

I planned to write this story with the headline, “Bing isn’t Better,” but the new engine won me over.

The new game in search is parsing information and displaying it in the engine itself (see Wolfram Alpha for the extreme example of this). Both Google and Bing, and other search products, have areas where they will collate and format information for you, instead of just linking you to external pages where the data reside. Bing does an extremely good job at this in several popular areas — like product reviews, movie listings, weather, travel, and stock prices.

While the service doesn’t reveal all its riches at once, it rewards exploration and yields pleasant surprises to users who poke around.

Google keeps improving in the area of in-search collation and display as well, but Bing makes Google look complacent, and that’s not good for Google. For the moment, Bing’s on top in this game. Try this search engine. I do not think you will regret it.

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Twitter has already had repercussions in the courtroom. Now it has had them at Microsoft’s annual company meeting as well. Employee tweets from the gathering Thursday revealed that we may see a major update to the company’s Bing search engine as early as next week.

“Saw the demo of Bing 2.0, super imressive! Watch out its release next week,” said one catalogued by All About Microsoft’s Mary Jo Foley Yes, “impressive” is not spelled correctly in the tweet–maybe someone needs to Google (GOOG) a dictionary stat!

“BING 2.0 terrific,” enthused another.

“Watch out guys ! bing + silverlight in maps = amazing !! goodbye google.”

And another: “Bing 2.0’s upcoming search visualization is pretty sexy…”

Finally, my favorite: “wondering if the Bing team really wanted everyone at the company meeting to announce on twitter when Bing 2.0 is going to be released?”

Evidently not. Reached for comment, Microsoft (MSFT) had only this to say: “We’re very excited about some of the new Bing features set to roll out over the next few months, but have nothing to announce today.”

But perhaps next week.

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