Are you a die hard Google search user? It is hard not to be. Everything comes preset to search Google by default. Why wouldn’t it? That being said, there are some built in features I prefer to use in Bing. You know, that search engine by Microsoft.

Many search engines have areas where they excel over its competition. However, unless you are a tech type, Bing’s entrance into social search didn’t exactly make it to everyone’s news feed.

For those of you who use the search engine best suited for the job, here are a few searches you may want to try on Bing next time you have the need.

1. Travel plans

Let’s face it, planning a trip is a pain. It takes a good chunk of your time to find good deals, the right places to stay, look up reviews… By the time you get it all planned, you really do need the vacation.

If you go to bing.com/travel, you can do all of those things in one spot. It searches the major travel sites and airlines to get you the best deal.

If you are still aren’t sure of your destination, you can get alerts emailed daily when airfare prices change. To get the alerts, you need to sign up for an account. The account is not anything more that a place to save your searches and an email address to email your alerts to.

2. Search results as an RSS feed

When researching a topic with most search engines, you are constantly going back to search the same terms. With Bing, you can use your RSS feed reader to keep track of your web search results.

It is just like any other site with an RSS feed. Simply search like normal and click the RSS icon. If you are using Firefox, it is right in the address bar. This feature work with most searches, just not videos and images.

3. Salary

For those of you who are in need of a job or perhaps looking for a career change, the salary search will be music to your ears.

[desired job title] salary

For this example, I typed mechanical engineer. The result shows a result with the most relevant info above all the links.

4. Share search results

You have the ability send your individual search results via email or publish them on your Twitter account or Facebook wall via Bing. This may not seem to neat at first, but at minimum it will save you time copying and pasting the link into another application.

  1. To the right of the search result, there is an arrow. Hover over it to show more information and sharing options.

  2. Click on the envelope to initiate your default email app. Similarly, you can click on the Facebook or Twitter icons to share.

The visual search makes looking up anything online more pleasant. It is a well laid out collage of information. Search like normal, then click on Visual Search.

Once you are a couple selections into the search, it displays quite a bit of information. Here is a quick example.

6. Search for a file type

When searching the web for something specific like a document, you can use an operator to aid in narrowing the results. Type in your search term then contains: then the file type.

Here is an example using soccer sites with videos. soccer drills contains:mov The results show over 4000 sites which have videos about soccer drills. This operator will work with a bunch of file types. Some of which are PDF, doc and mp3.

What other non-Google search engine tips do you have?

Trevor is a freelance writer covering topics ranging from the Android OS to free web and desktop applications. When he is not writing about mobile productivity, He is coaching and playing the world’s greatest game… Soccer.

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