Microsoft Bing (Spring 2012)

Every day, the Bing home page features a different, usually striking or beautiful photo. Hover the mouse over the image to get tips about what you're looking at.

The new social sidebar shows you activity from Facebook and lets you post a search-related query to your friends.

The sidebar's People Who Know section shows expert twitter accounts, with more social sites coming later.

Here's how you enter a question that your Facebook friends will hopefully help you out with.

Here's how the query looks on your Facebook profile page.

Snapshot will collect relevant information on a restaurant, movie, or product in this middle column. Here we see a restaurant's reviews, location on a map, and open hours.

In the main results, a gray thumbs up icon shows that your Facebook friends have liked a site. Clicking on the thumb pops up the contact's profile photo thumbnail.

In Bing's image search, you can narrow results down to a size, color, and whether the photo contains faces.

You can play samples of the video right on the result page.

Bing integrates with sites like StubHub for finding event tickets.

Bing's News has improved, with a clearer view of top stories and fresher content.

Play full songs from pop artists.

Bing Social fills you in on what's going on in the social networks.

Travel searches tell you whether an airfare is going up or down with price predictor.

Maps have this unique birds-eye view for better perspective than overhead satellite images.

You can see not only directions and traffic, but venue layouts and local prices.

An open API lets developers integrate with Bing Maps to produce apps that do things like showing parking or photos on a map. There's even one that lets you point the street view up to view the stars and constellations. Silverlight plugin required.

Last but certainly not least, you can earn reward points by searching with Bing, and cash them in for gift cards.

Bing Shopping offers all the parameters you could want for many product types--cameras, cars, electronics, and more.