Microsoft on Thursday took the wraps off Bing, the rebranded and rebuilt search engine formerly code-named Kumo, designed to replace Live Search. It's a solid improvement over the previous search product, and it beats Google in important areas. It will help Microsoft gain share in the search business. It's surprisingly competitive with Google.

In search presentation, Bing wins. It uses technology from Powerset (a search technology company Microsoft acquired) to display refined versions of your query down the left side of the page. For example, I searched for the game "Fallout 3" on Google and Bing. While Google gave me good results, Bing gave me a menu of "related searches," that included Walkthrough, News, and so on. 

I planned to write this story with the headline, "Bing isn't Better," but the new engine won me over. 

The new game in search is parsing information and displaying it in the engine itself (see Wolfram Alpha for the extreme example of this). Both Google and Bing, and other search products, have areas where they will collate and format information for you, instead of just linking you to external pages where the data reside. Bing does an extremely good job at this in several popular areas -- like product reviews, movie listings, weather, travel, and stock prices. 

While the service doesn't reveal all its riches at once, it rewards exploration and yields pleasant surprises to users who poke around. 

Google keeps improving in the area of in-search collation and display as well, but Bing makes Google look complacent, and that's not good for Google. For the moment, Bing's on top in this game. Try this search engine. I do not think you will regret it.

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The rumor had been that Microsoft would give Facebook the valuation it wanted to keep the relationship out of the hands of Google. "This deal marks an enormous advertising syndication win for Microsoft," said Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft.

On the conference call Johnson justified the valuation and the investment, saying that Facebook "has the ability to get to 200 to 300 million users." Johnson also suggested there was more to the deal than the public announcement indicated.

Facebook's Owen Van Natta declined to mention whether there were any other investors in the round. He also said that the Microsoft investment wouldn't affect the Facebook platform and third-party developers. Van Natta suggested in response to a question that the partnership may include paid search, but he declined to confirm that. For now it appears to be about display ads and "ad types that are unique to the social experience," explained Johnson.

In response to questions about monetization, Johnson declined to offer specifics: "We continue to see improvement in the monetization of the Facebook ad inventory," he said. Van Natta said that the Microsoft money would be used to grow and improve the infrastructure as well as for hiring, which he said would continue to ramp up next year.

While it's not a certainty, this makes an eventual Microsoft acquisition much more of a possibility.