Badda-Bing: Apple's Woz loves Microsoft's new search engine, Bing

If ever a ringing (binging?) endorsement of a new search engine there was, so it was from Woz for Bing. After watching Steve Ballmer demonstrate Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, today at the All Thing Digital Conference in Carsbad, Calif., Steve Wozniak couldn't say enough good things about it. This praise came during a video interview with the Apple co-founder and current chief scientist of Fusion-io by Tech Ticker.

Here are the highlights of Woz's praise.

"It was one of the most astounding software demos I've ever seen," he said " It was just so well thought out. The algorithms and the intelligence of it really impressed me. I started out being negative ... I thought, oh, great, another search engine, who needs that? I thought it was just going to be all marketing and sales pitch.... It's like the way you think and the things you want to do. I was very impressed, I'm going to try Bing."

Microsoft introduced Bing, formerly known as Kumo, on Tuesday. (Here are some highlights from an interview with Ballmer at the D7 conference.)

Bing offers several new features intended to help people perform faster, better searches with less poking around on Web pages they find through the search engine.

These include:

A set of navigation and search tools called an Explore Pane which includes a feature called Web Groups. These organize search results in the pane and in the results.

Related Searches and Quick Tabs features that provide a sort of table of contents for search results.

Best Match highlights the engine's top pick and Deep Links shows off more of the resources on a Web site in the results.

Quick Preview offers a preview of search results during a mouseover so people can decide if they want to leave the search page and click on a link.

Microsoft is reportedly ready to shell out up to $100 million to promote Bing hoping to bring Redmond's 6 percent share of the search market up by digging into Google's 80 percent share.

Also see: Microsoft to show off "Kumo" and offer more ad-supported cloud services

• Microsoft
• Bing
• Google
• Kumo
• search engines
• Steve Wozniak