Tired of sifting through too many lines of text when researching?  This tool will not only help you spice up your search life with a visual, but it will also serve to narrow your search results with relevant or related topics.

How do you utilize it?  Enter your initial search (mine was windows 7);  at the top of the results page select “Show Options”;  under “Standard view” select “Wonder Wheel”.  Now that you have the Wonder Wheel working, you can follow the most relevent search topics off the spokes.

If you open results in a new tab, you can continue to reference the related searches on the wheel, which may make your web surfing more efficient.  Nevertheless, it’s a fun new tool.   I’ll be using it for brainstorming blog topics.

It’s been just over 3 months since Bing hit the web waves and despite the hoopla of its marketing campaign I’ve only recently tested it out for good measure because I’m a habitual Google user. If you haven’t explored it yet, I offer you my reflections.

Bing has bling appeal. A colorful homepage picture posts new everyday, which when moused over offers pop-up factoids about the subject of the picture. The picture of the day also carries over into a cross fading header on search pages. I like the “ambiance” this creates, color feels good.

Bing organizes. A tidy left column keeps a running list of your recent searches, offers related searches as another list, and in yet another list, breaks out specific categories like “Restaurants” and “Tourism” to help you refine general searches for, say, “NYC.” Bing will also organize search results to group categorically on the page, so a search for NYC offers 3 to 5 general results followed by 3 to 5 more results associated with NYC Maps, followed by NYC Restaurants, followed by NYC Tourism, etc. This is handy and efficient, but such “smart” technology may interfere a bit too much with results. I still found some searches on Google were seemingly more comprehensive, or at the very least brought up results I actually wanted.

Which leads me to my main point, I’m using both search engines now, as well as a variety of browsers. I can’t pick sides. I like certain functions on both, so I’ll be switching between the two.

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