1. Remove the Bing background image

Many users think that the background image that is shown on the Bing homepage is more of a distraction than anything else. There is however a very easy way of removing the background image in the search engine to work with a barebone version without the background image. All that needs to be done is to open the Bing homepage with the following parameter:

http://www.bing.com/?rb=0

This will make the homepage show up without the background image which gets rid of the noise and can save some Kilobytes of data transfer as well.

2. IP Address lookup

Bing can lookup any IP address using an advanced parameter and display a list of domains that are hosted on that IP address. The parameter to do that is the following:

IP:[IP Address]

Substitute [IP Address] with a valid IP. The query IP:207.46.104.147 would for example display a list of domains hosted on that IP address.

3. Every search is available as an RSS feed

Every search on Bing is also available as an RSS feed which can be very interesting for webmasters who want to monitor their position in the search engine. The web feed will be updated whenever changes in website rankings occur. The feeds can be accessed from the web browser’s toolbars or by pointing a feed reader to the result url and appending

&format=rss

To the results. A search for Windows 7 would be available as an RSS feed from the following url

http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+7&go=&qb=1&format=rss

4. The contains parameter

The parameter contains will tell the search engine to only look for websites that contain that search term. This can lead to some interesting searches when combined with other search phrases, some examples are:

Windows 7 contains:torrent
Madonna contains:mp3
Google contains:pdf

5. Display only wallpaper images

Bing’s image search has already received some praise in the past days. One interesting feature is the ability to display only wallpaper images in the image search results. This is done by searching for a term in Bing image search and clicking on the Size category in the left sidebar. It will automatically display various size filters including one called wallpaper. This will display only images that have the exact size of the computer screen resolution.

The parameters are available in the url which means users can change it to find wallpapers for other screen resolutions as well.

Bing Experiment Rules:

• Use Bing exclusively for all of your searches for the next seven days
• Write down what went well and what did not
• Let us know your overall experience and rating of the search engine after the week
• You may perform the exact same search in another search engine to compare results
• You may also perform the exact same search in another search engine if Bing does not provide the results that you expect
• You may use other search engines to look at search engine rankings

Now that we have established the rules of the experiment we would like to offer participants an incentive to take part. We are going to give away five Ghacks t-shirts to five random participants providing that we get that many users participating.

We would like to hear about your thoughts and experience with Bing. If you have anything to say let us hear about it. Check out Install Bing Search In Selected Web Browsers and our initial short review of Microsoft Bing.

Users from the United States get on-page previews of the contents of each site by hovering the mouse cursor over a search result while users from unsupported countries do not get these previews. The previews can contain up to five links to other content of the site which is an interesting feature as search engines usually limit the exposure to one or two links to a site on each page. Many aspects of Bing look like Google Search. There are sponsored advertisements on top of the search results pages and on the left. Bing will also add related content like images where appropriate to the results.

Bing categorizes search results where appropriate. A search for New York will start with all results on the top and display categories like maps, weather, travel or attractions below each with a handful of search results. This is actually an interesting concept as it might aid inexperienced users in their search. Experienced users on the other hand will perform targeted searches to find the information they are looking for.

Bing will display the categories, related searches and the search history on the left. The image search of Bing displays image results on an infinite scrolling page with options to filter images by size, layout, color, style or people. A virtual map can be displayed which is really interesting for location based searches. It will for instance link pictures to locations on the map.

Bing Video search makes it possible to play videos directly on the results page. This can be done by hovering the mouse over a video or by clicking on the play button that appears when hovering over the video. Videos can also be filtered by length, resolution, screen size or source.

Bing offers some comfort function and elements that users will not find using Google Search. It seems to be targeting English speaking users only at this point as they can access features that users from non-English speaking countries cannot (unless they change their country to USA or UK). Everything on the other hand comes down to the quality of the search results. Bing seems to have improved over Windows Live, especially for popular search terms.

Microsoft surely has the work power and knowledge to create a search engine that could even the field. Bing however seems to be different from what people expected when they first heard about the new search engine. A short presentation video that has been published today gives a glimpse of the interface and functionality of the search engine.

The video concentrates on business, shopping, travel and health all very profitable niches but reveals little information about the aspects of the search engine that interest most users. The quality of the results can only be measured in tests once the search engine is accessible. The integrated features look interesting but might only appeal to a minority of users online.

We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster.

And features like cashback, where we actually give you money back on great products, and Price Predictor, which actually tells you when to buy an airline ticket in order to help get you the best price — help you make smarter decisions, and put money back in your pocket.

The Bing search engine is said to go live in the coming days.