Bing's Visual Search Has Me Seeing Stars

Bing introduced visual search in beta this afternoon and its prospects have me envisioning its applicability in travel.

Speaking at the TechCrunch 50 conference today minutes prior to the visual-search launch, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft senior vice president, online audience, told attendees that Bing has to take some major steps, as opposed to modest innovations, if it wants to compete with the likes of Google.

Mehdi placed visual search in that big-step forward category.

For now, Bing users can opt to search entertainment, famous people, reference, shopping and sports using visual search.

Users, for example, can search for HDTVs and then drill down and reduce the number of images by brand, type, screen size and resolution to pare shopping choices.

In an era when user interfaces are evolving with touchscreens, videos and imagery, substituting visual search for clunkier keywords seems like an appealing way to open up e-commerce and search to a segment of consumers who are looking for more intuitive ways to browse and take action.

Using images to search for HDTVs, cellphones, cars and movies seems like a way forward, but will it work in the complex world of travel where apples and oranges grow on the same vine?

I don't know precisely what Bing Travel will do in visual search, but I have to believe that it will get involved.

UPDATE: Bing Travel indeed has introduced a bit of visual search with a travel-related twist in the form of travel destinations with data partner Fodors Travel. There is no booking capability tied to this informational effort.

In the left-hand column, users can narrow their search by the best time to visit, continent, region and flight time, and then click on an image to access Bing links about that destination.

I didn't find it particularly useful, but this is day one.

Without tipping his hand, Hugh Crean, the general manager of Bing Travel, said Bing Travel "is working on launching a number of new and interesting travel scenarios."

So, there's more to come from Bing Travel in visual search.

Will we see consumers searching for hotels using property images and then whittling down their choices by brands, star ratings, price ranges and facilities like indoor pools or spas?

If the user interface is right, this could make for a more compelling shopping experience for some travelers.

Which would be easier and more interactive? Sorting out where to stay by clicking on a few images or plodding through pages of listings and links?

Many travel agents still prefer linear results on green screens to sexier GUIs, and some consumers will still prefer keywords to images.

But, visual search could open up paths for the more graphically minded.

Visual search has been tried elsewhere with poor to mixed results.

So, let's see if Bing can get things off the drawing board.

And, at the least, this Google-Bing donnybrook is great for consumers and innovation.

Google is so big it doesn't have to react tit-for-tat to Bing.

But, Bing's introduction of visual search will give Google another pesky nudge.

Kayak's Hafner Awaits Google Hotels

Kayak CEO Steve Hafner thinks "it's only a question of time" before Google begins displaying hotel pricing, a move that could change the online-travel ecosystem.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak, Hafner says he is much more concerned about how Kayak, the leading travel-metasearch player in the U.S., would navigate Google's souped-up role in facilitating hotel transactions than about the maneuverings of rivals like TripAdvisor, Fly.com, Bing Travel or Mobissimo.

"Google is by far the biggest source of travel information for consumers," Hafner says.

That point was confirmed for me last night when I drilled down a bit into what Google has been doing on the hotel front.

When I performed a Google search for Chicago hotels and then selected Hotel Allegro reviews, I accessed a link that produced:

• The property location in Google Maps;

• Overviews of the hotel and property details;

• Some 619 user reviews and ratings of Hotel Allegro from the likes of TripAdvisor, Priceline, HotelGuide and others;

• 50 photos and videos from the hotel itself and other content providers;

• 683 Web pages about the property, and

• Advertisements from Expedia, DealBase, Travelzoo and Hotelsmax.net.

The "look and feel" of this compilation is not very attractive, but that can be improved. And, with so many consumers launching their trip-planning through Google searches, you could argue that Google already is the most comprehensive "hotel website."

With speculation rampant about Google's next move in travel, Hafner believes he knows where Google is headed.

"Google doesn't care about flights," Hafner contends. "Hotels is where they'll enter."

He continues: "Hotels are a comparatively easy entry point and yield the highest margin for Google."

I blogged a couple of weeks ago about the Brave New World of Google Travel 3.0, arguing that Google may continue to build out its apps, from flight links to Google Maps, to put a heavier stamp on its travel offering, now that Bing Travel has raised its profile with its prominent integration into Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Hafner's theory on Google's evolution in travel is consistent with that line of thinking.

As it already does for products ranging from books to digital cameras, Google might display hotel price points in default displays and then advertisers could use Google Checkout to drive hotel transactions, Hafner says.

"So imagine a list of OTAs [online travel agencies] and suppliers, with Google Checkout to help facilitate conversion," Hafner says. "Pretty powerful."

And, Google already has another app, Google Base, featuring a data API, which perhaps could accommmodate hourly hotel pricing updates, Hafner says.

Some have argued that Google, with its market cap of $143 billion, doesn't worry about relatively little things such as Bing Travel.

But, I think with travel being such a large part of Google's advertising business, Bing's deft integration of Bing Travel in Google's own backyard has been an embarrassment to Google.

So, how would implementing hotel pricing -- and this could merely be Google's opening shot in travel-inventory pricing -- impact Google commercially?

"My guess is that it would be cannibalistic since many advertisers run their SEM [search engine marketing] campaigns on a same-session loss," Hafner says. "And, Google's opportunity to increase search share is relatively small (since it already owns 70 percent of queries in the U.S.) But, they'll probably need to move to this approach anyway to counter Bing etc."

In travel, as in other sectors, when Google bobs, the entire industry weaves.

There are lots of issues to sort out.

How would this impact the hotel-direct channel?

Who would be the winners and losers?

"It's an open question what role players like Kayak would have in a new ecosystem like this," Hafner says.

Google, by implementing hotel pricing (and who knows which travel segment after that), could certainly be disruptive.

Why would consumers navigate to TripAdvisor to read hotel reviews or to Kayak to compare prices, if they could do it all and get a more comprehensive look through Google?

Why go directly to a hotel website or to an online travel agency if you can get user reviews, maps and pricing on Google?

I received an inquiry from a business publication in Japan several months ago, asking me for answers when unfounded rumors were swirling that Google was going to launch "another Expedia."

Don't look for that sort of scenario. Google isn't going to become a travel agency.

Instead, there is plenty of room(s) for Google to expand its reach as a hotel kingmaker.

Wednesday's Travel InsideOut

Does Twitter's new home page disintermediate deal publishers a tad? The entire travel industry -– airlines, hotels, car rental firms, cruise lines, wholesalers, and destinations eventually will take note of the change that Twitter made to its home page yesterday, putting “search” front and center. All of these sectors eventually will be searching for ways to respond.

Dennis Schaal Blog: Twitter Travel Search: the Start of Something Big: Twitter relaunched its home page to emphasize "search," and the impact will reverberate for travel, financial services, lawn mowers -- you name it. Read more

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It’s a busy news day with the Twitter news above and this Bing-Yahoo development, too. A search partnership, which instantly makes Microsoft Bing a player, may be welcomed by travel advertisers as a hedge against the Google behemoth.

TechCrunch: Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal Imminent: Analysts Weigh In: As we first reported yesterday, Microsoft and Yahoo are on the verge of announcing a complicated search and search marketing alliance that will combine the no. 2 and no. 3 players in search into something that may have a chance of competing with Google (although combined they will still have less than half of Google’s 65% or so search market share). The deal will be announced shortly after signing, and could come as early as today (Wednesday). Read more

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Jay Witzel is out as president and CEO of Carlson Hotels Worldwide.

Finance and Commerce: Joly takes over Carlson hotels: Minnetonka-based Carlson, parent company of Carlson Hotels Worldwide, announced a reshuffling Tuesday that will give Hubert Joly, president and CEO of the lodging, restaurant, travel and marketing giant, leadership of Carlson’s hotel business. Read more

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Barry Diller, the man who controls Expedia Inc. and IAC, is up to something again in the media business, pledging to "bridge the gap between traditional television and the Internet." Expedia meets Home Shopping Network meets YouTube?

Business Week: Diller, Silverman: Expect the Unexpected: You can go blind trying to keep track of Barry Diller's many twists and turns. The 67-year-old former TV programming wunderkind started as the ABC (DIS) program executive who brought America the Movie of the Week; became a Hollywood mogul when he green-lit Steven Spielberg and his Indiana Jones franchise for Paramount Pictures (VIAB); bolted to the studios, where he correctly divined that the Big Three TV world order was falling apart and launched Fox Broadcasting (NWS), which began fracturing TV's viewing audience. Along the way, Diller had a hand in perfecting the notion of online shopping when he ran QVC and then put online travel and concert booking into a higher gear after buying Expedia (EXPE) and Ticketmaster (TKTM). Read more

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A lodging industry analyst compares current RevPar woes to the aftermath of 9/11 and the pundit is pretty glum about the pace of a recovery.

Yahoo Finance/The Wall Street Transcript: Lodging Industry RevPAR Declines Worst Ever: All Segments Down Significantly and No Upturn Until 2011: n the following brief excerpt from just one of the 10 detailed interviews in the 44 page report, Lodging industry expert Smedes Rose discusses the outlook for the Lodging Industry and for the REITs specializing in that sector and picks high return stocks with sustainable dividends for investors in this industry. Read more

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Is Orbitz a phoenix rising or a company rolling a rock uphill in its attempt to build a strong hotel business?

Dennis Schaal Blog: Is Orbitz Poised for a Priceline-like Comeback?: I reported yesterday how Barney Harford, the Orbitz CEO six months or so into his tenure, is stirring things up at 500 W. Madison St., Chicago, in trying to come to grips with building the Orbitz hotel business. Read more

Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.

Twitter Travel Search: the Start of Something Big

Twitter relaunched its home page to emphasize "search," and the impact will reverberate for travel, financial services, lawn mowers -- you name it.

Twitter announced the new home page on its blog today.

If you are a travel company and not on Twitter, the new home page may change your thinking fast.

If you run a travel company, whether you are involved in social media or not, this will impact your business.

If you are a deal publisher like Travelzoo, Smarter Travel, Cruise Critic, Travelscream, getaroom.com or Voyij, you have new competition because companies can post their deals without you.

I entered the term Cancun vacation into the Twitter search box and found the following tweets about packages, resort credits, contests and a lot of irrelevant clutter, too.

Here's a sampling:

bestcancuntrip Tell us about your best family vacation experience and WIN 8days/7nights in CANCUN in a five-star Resort! http://ow.ly/ip26 about 3 hours ago

bestcancuntrip Cancun Family Vacation Package! Stay in 5-Star beachfront resort Club Internacional for $599, 5Days/4Nights http://ow.ly/ioYM about 5 hours ago

DunhillVacation travel tuesday continues with another great caribbean vacation. Secrets Resorts & Spas in Cancun. $200 resort credit http://ow.ly/iod9 about 10 hours ago

bestfares Little Peso Vacation Deal Of The Day 4 Night, 4-star Hyatt Regency Cancun Weekend Getaway Airfare Included From $339 PP http://bit.ly/M1fnd about 10 hours ago

So, if you are a travel company seeking to push some deals or tout your brand, or you are a consumer looking for bargains that aren't stale, Twitter search gives you an immediate, fresh way to go bargain hunting and soothe your wanderlust.

The new home page, with its emphasize on search, is an unsophisticated test that undoubtedly will evolve and force changes at search engines like Google and travel metasearch engines, too.

Airlines, hotels, cruise line, tour operators, wholesalers, car-rental companies -- take notice.

Contrast the Twitter Cancun vacation search with a Google search of the keywords.

The Google search for Cancun Vacations is dominated by paid ads -- something the Twitter search hasn't dabbled with yet.

The Google local business results for Cancun vacation include a map pinpointing the locations of the relevant businesses. There are no maps in the Twitter results for now, but the tweets provide more of a sense of immediacy than the Google results.

To its credit, the first Google organic search result after the local business results is a link to Orbitz for Cancun packages and hotels, a relevant result.

I'm not saying that one search mode -- Google's or Twitter's -- is better than the other (although Google has had a lot more time and resources to define its search algorithms, of course). Twitter is a newbie in all of this.

But, what I am saying is that Twitter search will change Google, Bing, Facebook and Kayak, as well as Carnival Cruise Lines, JetBlue, Hertz and Mark Travel.

Make your own list.

With the introduction of Twitter's new home page, we witnessed the start of something big today.

Tuesday's Travel InsideOut

Hotel-security and privacy issues came to the fore with the revelations that ESPN sportscaster Erin Andrews was filmed naked in a hotel room. Details about how the incident occurred are sketchy -- the identity of the hotel is unknown, as is the filming method. Get ready for the hotel chain to take a brand hit, however temporary, if it is identified. And, the incident calls into question whether road warriors -- women and men -- need to fret about privacy in hotels or whether this was a one-time incident involving a celebrity journalist.

USA Today: How private are we in hotel rooms?: Female sportscaster filmed naked through hotel door peephole Breaking news: Word's spreading that computer hackers are using the promise of footage of a naked ESPN sportscaster in her hotel room - Erin Andrews - to spread a computer virus, according to USA TODAY's Game On. I hadn't heard about the footage until this morning, so I checked the Web and it turns out that the footage is real and made its way around the Internet last week. (No one to my knowledge has yet identified the hotel in which Andrews was filmed.) Read more

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Yahoo was slated to launch a new home page today, and the story below contains a screen shot. It will be interesting to see how Travelocity, the power behind Yahoo Travel, fares in the redesign in terms of home-page presence, and also the prominence given to various travel apps.

Wall Street Journal: Yahoo to Launch New Homepage Months Ahead Of Prior Schedule: Yahoo Inc. is expected to launch its new homepage Tuesday, months earlier than previously planned, according to people briefed on the company's plans. Read more

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ARC doesn't find anything not kosher about United's new credit card policy in terms of the ARC sales pact, but the jury is still out on other legal or antitrust issues if other carriers follow.

Travel Weekly: ARC says United's new policy doesn’t violate sales pact: ARC does not see United’s move to push some ARC agencies to be the merchant for air ticket sales as a violation of the ARC sales agreement, according to Allan Muten, ARC’s director for strategic communications. Read more

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With foreign carriers implementing pricey new surcharges, some analysts speculate that U.S. airlines will do likewise. FareCompare CEO Rick Seaney isn't buying into the trend.

USA Today: Foreign airlines raise fuel surcharges; U.S. carriers next?: Several foreign airlines are increasing fuel surcharges on passengers, raising the prospect that U.S. carriers could follow suit. Read more

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VisitEngland, which brings together the public and private sector for tourism promotion, will gauge industry and consumer sentiment on hotel rating systems and user-generated content. Will a booster organization like VisitEngland enable consumers to write their own destination or hotel reviews? Can anyone pronounce VisitEngland Advisor?

Travolution: VisitEngland considers user reviews in hotel rating shake-up: VisitEngland is to survey the industry on its Common Standards star rating system as part of a wider review which could see user generated reviews taken into account. Read more

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In the Google-Bing wars, the San Francisco Chronicle picked the "away" team, the Redmond, Wash.-based Bing, as the better search engine. Is there no hometown loyalty anymore?:)

San Francisco Chronicle: Is it better to Bing that Google?: Forget movie blockbusters. This summer's best death-cage match is shaping up to be between two technology Goliaths: Google and Microsoft. Read more

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Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.

Update: Why Bing Travel Went Down

You might consider this a redundant question of sorts, but this is why Bing Travel went down for some 36 hours over the July 4th weekend when a transformer blew out much of the power at the Fisher Plaza facility in Seattle.

In the heat of the crisis over the weekend, much of the detail behind the incident was unavailable, but Bing provided me with some background today.

Bing Travel, known as Farecast before it was rebranded with the launch of Microsoft's Bing search engine, had "redundant counterpoints" for its core networking systems, databases and Web/applications servers, but they all were located within Fisher Plaza, said Bing spokesperson Whitney Burk.

"Microsoft has invested deeply in fortifying the Bing Travel infrastructure to handle high-volume server loads and emergency failure situations, and the amount of redundancy was increased in anticipation of the Bing launch [which took place in the beginning of June]," Burk said.

When the incident occurred last weekend, Microsoft already was in the process of transitioning the "legacy Farecast servers" to Microsoft's cloud computing platform, "the goal of which is to prevent this sort of unforeseen situation from impacting our customers," the spokesperson said.

Citing the complexity of the task, Burk said Microsoft hopes to have Bing Travel moved to cloud computing by the fall.

I will let Burk explain how cloud computing gives computing management systems new, well, "repurpose," and lessens reliance on specific hardware and specialized configurations in disaster-recovery situations.

Says Burk: "Fundamentally, cloud computing platforms offer a layer of hardware abstraction to applications that run on them. This means applications, when retooled to run on the cloud, no longer need to be sensitive or aware of the number of machines available to them running in production. Another distinction of cloud computing technology is that configurations with specialized hardware are avoided. When individual machines fail (which they sometimes do), the cloud computing management systems will automatically detect the failures and repurpose new or existing machines to run the applications.

"Because cloud computing platforms usually consist of thousands or tens of thousands of machines, adding capacity to handle increased load is simply a matter of changing some basic configurations and deploying more copies of the services and applications to additional machines. This also true for geo-redundancy. A new instance of an entire website can be brought online relatively quickly; it’s simply a matter of configuring a set of available machines in the cloud and letting the management software perform the software deployments and traffic routing."

With its data-mining and predictive technology, Bing Travel seemingly indeed runs on a complex system, and it reportedly was the last of the affected websites in Fisher Plaza to begin humming again.

Real estate website Redfin, which had redundancy capabilities at a second location, reportedly was back online in about five hours.

Meanwhile, asked about the business impact of the outage to Bing Travel, Burk declined to comment.

Bing Travel Outage a Real Downer

As of this writing, Bing Travel (a.k.a. Farecast) has been down for almost a day-and-a half.

Various news reports, including this one, indicate a fire in a downtown Seattle data center, probably caused by a blown transformer, took down Bing Travel and a host of other nontravel websites.

A photo depicts an unidentified person from one of the impacted websites hauling a server out the door of Fisher Plaza, the site of the fire.

A notice on Bing.com/travel stated:

Sorry, Bing Travel is currently unavailable

A fire occurred at Fisher Plaza in downtown Seattle just after midnight on Friday morning, July 3. A blown transformer knocked out power to the entire building, which is home to the Bing Travel servers. This is isolated to Bing Travel only, and there has been no impact to any other aspects of Bing. We're hard at work to restore service following this unexpected event and appreciate your patience.

In the meantime, you may use Microsoft's travel partner, Orbitz, for your travel needs.

The usual travel link on the Bing homepage was removed, but the outage seemingly doesn't impact other services on Microsoft's new search engine (excuse me, "decision engine"), Bing.

The Bing Travel outage, however, does impact Bing's slew of travel industry partners, including technology providers, airlines and hotels, and certainly won't inspire consumer confidence.

However, the reputation hit may be short-lived. After all, there are few customer service issues involved because Bing Travel, as a metasearch site, is not a travel agency and doesn't book any travel.

There's no further detail yet from Bing Travel about what happened and why a back-up system, if there was one, didn't kick in. Bing Travel is a relatively small company, but Microsoft would certainly have the monies and resources to power a solution for such outages.

There will be lessons learned from this fiasco about data center security and redundancy. Many large travel companies, including Amadeus, have back-up data centers. Amadeus's data center is located in Erding, Germany, and a clone of that one is positioned 30 kilometers away.

TechFlash reported that a fire occurred at the same data center in June 2008, and a Redfin official outlined some of the steps the company took to avoid what author James Baldwin might have characterized as "The Fire Next Time."

Especially since 9/11, data center security is paramount.

Meanwhile, it was interesting this morning that a Google search for Bing Travel retrieved Bing Travel's outage announcement as the top organic result.

Conversely, a Bing search for Bing Travel produced no word of the Bing Travel unavailability, at least on the first page of results.

And, the second-highest Sponsored Link in a Google search for Bing Travel was from Kayak, which reportedly has accused Microsoft of copying Kayak's look and feel.

The other day there was a Twitter debate about whether some of the underlying technologies that help make Bing Travel and Kayak go dictate the allegedly similar GUI. I'm no expert on that question, but I tend to doubt it.

Both metasearch sites use ITA Software to power the bulk of their air searches so they can largely avoid scraping airline websites.

And, both Bing Travel and Kayak count Orbitz as a key online travel agency partner.

No, for conspiracy theorists out there, I don't think the Bing Travel outage was the result of a foray by a Kayak hit team.

Seriously, Kayak and Bing Travel, while ardent competitors, have a lot of respect for one another and both have great products.

I was just about to write that both Kayak and Bing have great tech teams, too. Well, for Bing Travel this weekend, the jury has to be out on that question.

More Bing for Your Bucks: Microsoft May Be Mulling a Farecast for Retail

I'm attending the invitation-only Microsoft Search Summit in Bellevue, Wash., today, and got an inside look at some of the thinking behind the launch of its new Bing search engine.

One headline that I took away from the conference is that Microsoft may be mulling leveraging Farecast's data-mining and predictive-pricing technology for use across major retail categories in Bing.

Another newsy tidbit I discovered is that Microsoft's reported $80-$100 million Bing branding campaign may just be the beginning since there are plans on the drawing board to pour "six to seven times that amount" into Bing advertising over the next three or four years, a Microsoft employee told me.

Regarding a potential initiative on retail-pricing predictions, a couple of Bing officials hinted that something like this might be on the agenda, although I didn't get the feeling that consumers would be able to use Bing to delve into the pricing fluctuations of a Nikon D90 digital camera any time soon.

As I wrote a few days ago about the new Farecast-MSN Travel consolidation into Bing Travel, Farecast, acquired by Microsoft a little more than a year ago, brings tremendous value to the travel-search experience.

For example, Farecast studies historical airfare trends and informs me to "wait" and not buy a $350 LAX-ORD flight on American Airlines because the fare likely will drop.

Farecast has been doing this sort of predicting for several years in the travel sector and has the wherewithal to lead efforts for Bing to get involved in predicting retail pricing across the Bing Shopping vertical.

So imagine if Bing Shopping, which offers consumers a Cashback program, can also implement pricing predictions on major retail items?

That could be a winning combination in terms of providing value to consumers.

Bing Travel General Manager Hugh Crean says a key issue in mining retail categories for pricing trends is whether there are "signaling" data to study.

Another issue, of course, is that many retail items have a short shelf-life so these types of products might be unsuitable targets for examining their pricing trends.

On other issues, there was an under-current of some controversy at the conference concerning the way Bing takes steps at times to keep users glued to Bing.com instead of facilitating their navigation to third-party websites.

David Berkowitz summed up the issue in Advertising Age with his post, "Microsoft's Bing Is a Search Portal, not a Decision Engine."

For example, after conducting a Bing search for a Nikon D90 digital camera, the top result comes in the form of a Bing instant answer, or summary, and when you click on that result, you remain on Bing.com.

Some conference attendees muttered that Microsoft is exercising too much control over the user in stealing traffic from third-party sites without compensating them for their content.

Members of the Bing team, and some conference attendees, countered that third-party sites would probably welcome the Bing exposure, and that this free publicity would drive traffic to their sites nonetheless.

In the travel sector, some suppliers, including American Airlines, have pursued legal actions against companies that scrape their content without permission and sans a partner relationship.

So, maybe we will be hearing more on the "search-portal" front in the future.

The Bing Travel Experience: So Far, So Good

In advance of Microsoft releasing its new search engine, Bing, I took Bing out for a brief test drive.

Bing has some features that are very cool, but I didn't see anything that makes me believe that Bing will significantly rain on Google's parade. (Although the impact of Microsoft's planned $80 to $100 million marketing campaign for Bing can't be dismissed.)

But, one area where Bing really sets itself apart is in the travel user experience (or UX, for you geeks out there) because Bing, unlike Google and Yahoo, has a travel innovator, Farecast, in its portfolio.

To be more precise and newsy, Microsoft has Bing Travel, a melding and rebranding of Farecast and MSN Travel (including Farecast for flights and hotels, and Orbitz for vacation packages, cars and cruises), at its disposal.

By the way, a side note to Yahoo: You decided to kill metasearch engine FareChase, but think how you might have leveraged it to enhance the travel-search experience within Yahoo search had you not been beholden to Travelocity and given the FareChase team some resources and clout in this post-Yahoo Travel, AOL Travel and MSN Travel era.

About Bing generally, one of its most appealing features is that when you move your cursor to the right of a search result, a box opens summarizing that search result.

This feature is huge because users can avoid all of those unproductive, back-and- forth clicks and decide up-front on an informed basis about whether they should click on a result.

However, I don't see this mouse-over feature as something that Google or Yahoo couldn't quickly emulate if they choose.

And, Bing has nifty Images, Videos, Related Searches and Search History features running down a left-hand column alongside the search-results page in an easily accessible, very clean-looking manner.

And, like Twitter's Trending Topics, the Bing homepage offers Popular Now links, which today featured French Open Tennis, Desmond Hatchett, Christina Aguilera and Jay Leno. (Meanwhile, Twitter's top two Trending Topics were #myweakness and, ahem, Google Wave.)

OK, so here's the travel angle.

The Bing preview version lists travel as one of only six categories or verticals (Images, Videos, Shopping, News, Maps and Travel) on the Bing homepage in a bow to the primacy of travel as a key Web category.

And, at least for flight search for now, Bing's deft use of Bing Travel, including Farecast's predictive technology, sets it apart from flight searches on Google and Yahoo.

For example, a Google search of EWR to LAX retrieves a Google flight-search box as the top result with a link to Flights from Newark, NJ to Los Angeles, CA, which defaults to an Expedia search. However, users can input their departing and returning dates and also conduct traditional, if unexciting searches of CheapTickets, Expedia, Hotwire, Kayak, Orbitz, Priceline and Travelocity in separate windows.

Ho-hum.

A Yahoo search of EWR to LAX offers no such shortcut at all. Kudos to Yahoo for its agnosticism, but users would have to scroll down to the relative boondocks of the seventh organic search result to access any reference to Yahoo Travel, powered by Travelocity.

And, now, Bada-Bing. (For international readers -- ha -- James Gleick defines the term as "American slang “suggesting something happening suddenly, emphatically, or easily and predictably; ’Just like that!’, ’Presto!’"

OK then, Presto.

A Bing search of EWR to LAX produces a much richer and more informational experience than do the Google and Yahoo searches.

The first result in the Bing search is what Bing Travel General Manager Hugh Crean refers to as an "instant answer." It comes with a link to "Cheap tickets from Newark to Los Angeles" and a "Fares Predicted to Rise or Hold Steady" graphic, both of which take the user to a wealth of tools from Farecast, I mean, Bing Travel.

Other links within the Bing instant answer resulting from an EWR to LAX search include:

$239 EWR>LAX
All deals from New York
All deals to Los Angeles
30-Day Outlook for EWR>LAX

Clicking on the graphic or main link in the instant answer brings the Bing searcher to an integrated Bing Travel page where the prospective traveler quickly finds out that Farecast predicts with 80 percent confidence that the fares will rise or be steady over the next seven days.

Users can then get details about Farecast's fare predictions, view fare trends on a calendar, search for flights (while filtering in or out their preferences) using Bing Travel metasearch or conduct one-window-at-a-time searches using booking engines from Hotwire, Expedia and Priceline.

There is just much more meat on the bone in travel searches using Bing in contrast to Google and Yahoo, largely because of Microsoft's acquisition of Farecast in April 2008.

Bing's introduction is an important development for the travel industry.

Big bad Microsoft (and it almost pains me to say this, given its legacy of Windows and Internet Explorer bullying) paved a new path when it put a travel search engine, Farecast, as the lead of MSN Travel.

And, now, Microsoft has given added weight to travel as a key vertical and has integrated it into part of its overall search strategy and not, to borrow a phrase, albeit out of context, from AOL, as some sort of "walled garden."

In the Bing preview version at least, travel has primacy on the Bing homepage. Consider that it has that prime real estate while the following are absent as standalone verticals: autos, real estate, movies, music and finance etc.

"Now we are part of an overall search strategy that will be in front of all consumers, coming through Bing and Bing Travel," Crean told me.

In fact, Crean is now part of the Bing search team, helping to develop overall search strategy, and he reports to a vice president of search.

Although Google is too, well, big and bad to admit it, I expect Bing's on-time arrival will hasten efforts in Google land to improve the travel-search experience.

And, that increased attention can't be bad for travel.

Bada-Bing.