Bing Versus Google: The Epic Battle for Search Engine Dominance II

So, despite the fact that Bing's main search engine seems to be very much the same old engine with a new wrapper, there are some pretty significant differences with some types of searches. A generic search for FLIGHTS TO VEGAS yields the normal junk results, but at the top of the junk, like Google puts it maps at the top of the search results, you get a little widget that has the Bing Travel engine.

Bing has an entire travel department/engine. For some travel related searches there is a price predictor which tells you which way the price is currently headed and shows you on a calendar when the price to travel is lowest. This is not available for many cities and searches yet, so it might be a little frustrating, but very cool for a start. I might even say that this travel engine is better than anything I have seen to this point.

Also, when you click on the flight you wish to book Bing sends you directly to the booking page at Priceline, Delta, Orbitz, or whichever site you wish to use to conduct your booking. This is pretty neat because this has to be updated OFTEN for Bing to keep the correct page linked and the prices live from the other sites. I think this might go beyond an actual search engine into the realm of Microsoft actually tapping into the databases of ALL the airlines, Orbitz, etc. A monster of a project to be sure.