So, there have been commercials lately for the latest search enging - bing.com.  Given that I spent 18 years doing research and have gone through the evolution of many search engines, I thought I would check it out today.

Now, mind you, these days I only keep TWO search engines on my "Favorites" list: Alta Vista and Google.  Google is more sensitive to general pop culture flow when searching, but Alta Vista remains more fine tuned when looking for specific things.  Google tends to feed me pages of index pages when I'm searching something specific (scientific or historical, for instance), whereas Alta Vista tends to list specific sites devoted to or mentioning my search object.

So, between the two of those, I haven't really needed another search engine.  Dogpile never did it for me, and Ask.com - well, their own pages are so loaded with advertising and pop-ups it annoys me into avoiding it.

Anyway, I decided to give Bing.com a try, testing searches for "ScribblerWorks" and for "Sarah Beach".

VERY interesting results.

For "ScribblerWorks" it did indeed turn up my main pages and blogs with that name on them.  Good.  It also turned up listings for those who have a link to my site on their one sites/blogs. Hmm, good.  It turned up post responses that have that either as my screenname or my email address included. Interesting.  And because of that last aspect (that it tracks the @scribblerworks.us as well), I also found a copy of the Press Release for The Scribbler's Guide to the Land of Myth on a press release site. Very good - as I had not actually seen a copy of it out in circulation (paid for it, and approved the copy, but not actually seen it posted anywhere).

When I searched "Sarah Beach", right on the first page were two listings on Facebook for other Sarah Beaches -- I expected that, which is why I put my middle name in when I registered on Facebook.  That upped my "Sarah Beach" awareness by another two people.  Then I also found a Sarah Beach who does professional graphic design (and apparently has the SAME middle initial as I do!), and a Sarah Beach in San Diego who does copy writing apparently.  (What is it with "Sarah Beach" - we seem to have a high percentage of artists or writers or both!)

I have only skimmed through the other features of Bing (and not registered yet).  But it has a LIVE map reflecting freeway traffic as part of it's offerings, and that is one thing that's really useful, especially in Los Angeles.  So, I went ahead and added it to my "Favorites" list.  I'll continue exploring it, but so far, it looks very promising. 

Just thought I'd throw this preliminary recommendation out there.