Yet Another Bing Thread (YABT) (a review)

I got my hands on a Bing preview code yesterday and I must say, I'm impressed. It provides better results than the current live search (an example of this (from Liveside) is that a search for Liveside on Live search takes you to a page on their site other than their homepage, while a search on Bing yields their homepage). Also awesome are the mouseover popups - done in such a way as to not be obtrusive or annoying while yielding useful information (I must admit I was queasy when I first found out about these, but now I've been able to try them I'm not).

Another feature that I love is that it seems to know what you're searching for (when you search for something on Google, Live Search, Yahoo! etc. it just searches for a series of words, Bing is different). An example of this is a search for "The Italian Job" - as well as just trawling the web for the phrase "The Italian Job" a series of film related options appears to the left of the search results. And, what's more, the search results are sorted into criteria such as "Quotes" "Reviews" and "Posters":

The video search results screen is also greatly improved - contrast:

All in all, great work Microsoft! Just one major issue: localisation: if I have my country set to UK instead of Bing shopping I get ciao!, I don't get the reliable medical information, I get multimap instead of Bing maps (I know at least maps is consistent with current Live Search), heck it even doesn't organise my "Italian Job" results in a nice, movie related way, like the US version does. I'm wandering if this is something to do with the fact that the UK localisation names itself "Bing Beta" while the US localisation names itself "Bing Preview" - but please Microsoft, don't deny your international customers all the coolness of Bing, please bring the international locations up to feature parity by launch. Thank you.

I'll now leave you with a few other screenshots