my first impressions and your thoughts?
www.bing.com
For a beta I am pretty impressed with the information it presents to me and the way it handles it, as it might mean the end of needing 10 or so tabs just to figure out if the website even has what you are after, it also works better when the search criteria is more like a question, eg sports team score and the like. As it gives what i call the 'bing' window something to look for.
This works with a little window that opens up on the right of the search result after mousing over it (sort of like the interclue.com plugin for ff), it then tries to present the best information that matches up to your search or a group of bulletin points (try 'binging' google news for a easy example). You can also get a quick brief on what features the site may have as well such forums, and other links that appear to be in a sites left bar navigation window.
The aesthetics are nice and mostly white, much like google except for the top nav menu, except not as sterile which is a nice change. Search results are not as cluttered as googles with a whole bunch of sub links trying to get in the way (but not gone, just moved to the 'bing' window). Image searches are a nice improvement over googles with a larger search return per page and less information shown to you unless you mouse over it.
Also the page setup works quite well with the major search results pushed to the middle a little bit by a 'search related' list makes it easier on the eyes and more organised as google is wasting a fair bit of space on nothing (especially those with wide screens).
On the number of search 'hits' for a lot of the tests with rather general words I did bing had about half the returns of google on average, but since when has any one ever looked past the first 10 pages when you put in half decent criteria. The quality of the returns was about the same as google with finding the info i was after without opening any pages in the first 10 results
Overall i would say its better than google, as in how firefox was compared to internet explorer back in the early days (this is like getting tabbed browsing for the first time again imo), and with the raft of features it has promised to come it should get even better.
Any one else happy with it so far? Anything I missed, but should see?