Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Demos Bing Search at D7

The last day of the All Things Digital 7 Conference kicked off this morning with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer taking stage. The highlight of the session was Ballmer’s unveiling and demo of Microsoft’s new Bing search tool. Bing search (www.bing.com) will not launch publicly until June 3 but we got a nice overview of some of the features from the audience. The results page shows the best match at the top. Similar to Ask.com, if you type in a simple question an “instant answer” will appear. In the demo, Balmer also searched for an American Airlines flight number. The top field on the results page revealed all the flight information including the flight’s status (on time or delayed) and its gate number. We caught some screens. See below. All searches provide background tags that provide information about the site. Also hovering on the search result shows an excerpt of text from the page so you don’t actually have to leave the Bing site to see what you are getting. Ballmer stressed that the engine is a mix of algorithms and semantic web information and aims to better understand human search. If you search for a company name not only does the site come up, but right below it is the customer service number. Yep, a search for Microsoft provided customer service numbers! Apparently Gates doesn’t pick up those calls. Searching for Taylor Swift and then navigating to the video page shuffled up a number of music videos. Hovering over the video started playback.  No need to press play. Also demoed was the shopping comparison tool which looks strikingly similar to Amazon.com’s layout.