Welcome to the beautiful snow capped mountains where you can view blue skies from the lush green landscape below. While you’re at it, click on one of the areas of the pristine wilderness backdrop to learn that, “at just over 2 million acres, this wilderness area is larger than the state of Massachusetts.” Where is this place? It’s one of Bing’s beautiful interfaces, in this case featuring a photo of Denali National Park. Click on the box, and Bing will take you to what Microsoft’s engineers think are the most helpful sites on Denali.

But wait, that was so yesterday. Today, you can visit a unique island inaccessible by car, and without ever getting into a plane! Today, Bing will take you to the Cinque Terre!

Even at first glance, the casual Internet user will realize Bing has something Google doesn’t. Bing’s got bling!

But does Bing’s aesthetic appeal bring enough attention to the site to boost it beyond Google? The next few weeks should be telling, but it’s definitely enough to invite users to hang around a while and scope things out.

Bing’s aesthetic appeal isn’t just limited to the first thing you see. It keeps going and going Check anywhere in the world you want to see, and view images from those areas. Bing even recognizes that you’re looking for a country, presenting not just a random image, but even the country’s map, history, culture, government, and jobs. If you’re not interested, that’s ok. Instead, you can look at the beautiful pictures Bing wants to show you. The same search in Google offers a much less eye-catching find.

Of course, enhanced aesthetics isn’t the only thing Bing claims to offer for beating out Google. Taking Bing’s offered tour shows that they a few more things to share, including major options under travel, shopping, health, local, and “even more!”  Like similar incentives previously offered under Microsoft’s Live Search, Bing also offers Bing cashback. Bing even knows where I live, what restaurants there are and claims to know if I’ll like them or not. Hmm. That’s a lot of intuition for an Internet search engine.

So far, Bing appears to offer a lot of great features. Yet it is still slightly different than Google, and Google has a lot of unique tricks up its sleeve that intensive computer users simply need. And of course, there’s the fact that Firefox and Safari have built-in toolbars. If I’m looking for images, I might be inclined head over to Bing.  But for now, all things considered, I still prefer Google.

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