Over the past week or so, there have been a rash of television commercials advertising Microsoft’s new Bing search engine. They’re annoying, pointless, and frankly….make me want to google Bing to see what it actually is.

I went to Bing for the first time today. Here’s what I discovered:

It’s prettier than Google. — But I prefer the clean non cluttered interface. The page takes time to load. Not a good first impression for a search engine.

You can turn off your “Search History” — But I don’t want my search history tracked to begin with.

The front page has cool little factoid mouseovers regarding the frontpage picture — but why do I care? Something cool on the web is really only cool once..then it’s annoying, kind of like those dancing hamsters.

If Bing is being touted as a “Decision Engine” then shouldn’t its algorithms point to things that would help a person make a decision about what hotel to stay at for example?

Bing has a link to get local options for your search — But Google has those same results on the first search page, usually about #3 or 4 on the list.

To be fair, I do like the popup of an extended page excerpt on the search results if you mouseover the short blurb. And I can see some advantages to the way the links on the side are organized, but it still means you have to click on the link to find what you want.

If Microsoft wants to make a “Decision Engine” then why not have some kind of decision tree? At first glance, there’s nothing really spectacular about Bing.

Bing got no bling. At least none that is good enough to make me stop using Google.

I don’t even think I’ll bookmark it.

Looks to me like Bing is just another search engine. It’s