Had a lovely surprise this morning, BING was available here in the UK! I wasted no time in accessing it to try out. To my amazement the first thing it asked me once I accessed the BING home page was did I want to enable it in my browser? (Flock) Why amazing? Because I couldn’t use Live Search inside Flock it just wasn’t available to me even when I visited the Live Search home page. So I enabled it as my default search engine in Flock, and there it will stay.
It became immediately apparent that not everything is fully implemented yet in our UK version, we don’t have the list of our search history on the left hand side of the search results for example, and some other aspects have not been included yet. Hopefully this will all be rectified on June 3rd when it officially launches.
The biggest surprise for me was that a Bing Community is available as this was not mentioned previously in the information received up to press about Bing. At the moment this chiefly comprises of a Blog area which contains the following All Blogs, Search Blogs, Webmaster Blogs, Developer Blogs, Travel Blogs and Maps Blogs which are all currently written by the individual BING teams. There is also a forum included for members of the Bing community to post questions and queries about different aspects of Bings features and to give the relevant teams some feedback regarding BING. These forums are divided into the following categories, All Forums, General, Developer, Search and Webmaster. There are also two other separate areas available for Media and Events.
In order to become a member of the Bing Community , you need to fill in the usual Profile details about yourself, choose an Avatar to use in the Forums, etc. You can also enrol your blog or website address to be added to Microsoft’s search index from HERE. As for the blogs available to read inside the Bing Community these are written by the different Search teams and not by members of the community nor does it seem that there is any intention to include blog posts made by the members of the Bing Community, although a member of the Bing Team Betsy states that it may be possible for members to contribute a ‘guest post’ by requesting this in a reply to a Bing team members blog.
I was really surprised by the inclusion of this BING community, I had seen nothing to indicate that a community was to be included inside the BING website. In order to join it all you need is your Windows Live ID. Why not give it a try and post some questions about BING to the teams?
TG. 
Oh and my BING desktop application is not working fully as yet either, so it looks like I’ll have to wait until June 3rd, then BING will hopefully be just one click away!
