Australian users have generally got a lousy deal with local search features on Microsoft’s Bing site, but it has added one useful feature this weekend: movie times when you search on a current movie name. The feature got off to a slightly rocky start on Saturday, but now seems to work pretty well, displaying details directly on the Bing site and without needing to add “movie times” as a keyword.
Many Bing services in Australia lag well behind the US site, but the local Maps implementation has just added a potentially useful feature: live traffic information from Suna for Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
With all the different sizes and shapes of monitors these days, it’s sometimes difficult to find wallpaper that perfectly matches your desktop resolution, but weblog Digital Inspiration points out that Bing’s image search makes it really simple.
Google offers SafeSearch to stop offensive content popping up on your workplace computer or in front of the kids, and Microsoft’s rival search engine Bing has a similarly-labelled option. But while Google’s system can distinguish between images and text in videos, Bing seems to take a much less subtle approach: if a video sounds remotely raunchy, it gets blocked regardless of actual content.
One of the more longlasting criticisms of Bing, Microsoft’s wannabe Google rival, is the lack of localisation on actual useful features, as opposed to just offering pretty background images. There hasn’t been much action on the front so far, but allegedly things will improve in 2010.
Every time you click results in Google, Yahoo or Bing, a special URL tracks your click—and makes it annoying to copy and paste. The CyberNet blog runs down click-track-preventing tools for all three search engines.
Microsoft’s latest addition to the local version of its Bing search engine is “hot spots” offering trivia about its background image. So why did New York get highlighted on the first day?
