Goodbye Windows Live Search or MSN Search, this coming June 3rd in English Canada (Bing.ca) and the United States (Bing.com) Microsoft will replace their search engine with a new one called Bing. French Canada and Europe will still have access to Bing, but in beta form and without features customized to their location.

Bing’s focus will be on offering assistance with the most common searches involving travel, health, shopping, and local search. When people search for a hotel, for example, they want more than just the hotel’s website and so the goal is to package all of the additional information most people want into the first set of results from their first search query. With these popular categories, Microsoft is trying to reduce the number of times you have to use a search engine to get what you’re looking for.

Bing represents more of a change in Microsoft’s attitude to search, to how they relate to consumers and organize results than of any new technology. Bing is just Bing, not Microsoft Bing or Windows Bing, or MSN Bing. Bing is just a search engine, not a suite of products, not a network of services. It’s just Bing.

Several years ago there was a fundamental shift that occurred as a result of the digital revolution and changes in society. People began to focus on finding freedom within their lives, of focusing on the rewards over the work, of planning vacations and get-togethers and celebrating family as much as their careers. Google with their simplistic design and fun brand connected with this shift well. Google can be whatever you need it to be. Microsoft has only just now discovered this. Bing, as the company informs me, can be used as a verb. Looking for something? Just Bing it. Is Bing the best name they could have come up with? I'm not sure it is, my best spin that I can come up for it personally is to read Bing as be-ing, as in human being. In Microsoft's world, this whole approach is new.

The challenge it seems has been to find a way in which Microsoft can understand that shift that suits their own philosophy and now they seem to have reached one. People are no longer using search engines in the way they had thought. It’s not about research, but about planning. People aren’t looking for obscure answers as much as they are using search engines to plan trips, shopping excursions, healthcare, and local gatherings. As Microsoft’s Senior Vice-President Yusuf Mehdi says, the search engine has become a decision engine.

Bing uses five techniques for better organizing and presenting results:

Home Page Hotspots – Everyday Bing’s homepage will contain a different background photograph, each one embedded with hidden hotpots that when you click on with your mouse will display related links to help you start your search in travel, health, shopping, and local queries.

One Click Tools – In addition to a set of navigation tabs at the top of the page that help refine results, Bing includes a navigation menu bar on the left with quick links to both related searches and your search history. Although it risks adding clutter to the page design and making Bing seem more complicated than its rivals, Microsoft insists the tools will reduce the number of times users will need to reach for the back button.

Instant Answers – Anyone looking for information on their flight status will find a tool that will appear in the results. Just type in your airline and flight number and Bing will display your flight status for you. This is one of several hidden tools that deliver direct answers to common queries including stocks, sports, and weather.

Best Match – When you search for a company’s website, the search results will include direct links to that company’s divisions. Search for CTV and in addition to our front page, you’ll also get direct links to our weather, news, entertainment divisions and leading shows such as Canada AM.

Hover Preview – As you move your cursor along the results on the page, a small window will appear offering a quick preview including details you’ll find if you continue on to that destination. The idea is to reduce the number of back-and-forth trips made between the results page and web site destinations.

These include other enhancements such as the addition of auto-suggest into the search bar, so as you type Bing will bring up suggested phrases to use to help you get better results and thumbnail results in the video search that allows users to watch the clip, in the thumbnail itself, before visiting the video clip in full.

As it exists at launch, Bing still isn’t the search engine to take on Google, but it is a significantly better service from what we’ve seen from Microsoft in the past. It’s friendlier, more open to the needs of users, and yes, when it comes to those common searches in health, travel, shopping, and local queries, it actually is useful. For many people, I expect Bing to find a spot in their web bookmarks, a useful alternative to Google for specific searches.