By Daryl Lang

Bing, the renamed Microsoft search engine that launched last month, is the underdog in a fight to win users from Google.

So far, the site's search features have won good reviews. But one of Bing’s biggest advantages isn’t technical at all. In contrast to Google, which has a famously Spartan design, the Bing home page welcomes visitors with a big photograph that changes daily.

“It’s the feature that we get the most feedback on, out of everything that we’ve done,” says Stephanie Horstmanshof, editorial lead for Microsoft’s search group. “We get feedback every single day from people telling us how much they love it, how much they look forward to it... We get feedback from teachers who actually pull it up in front of their classrooms every day.”

Every two weeks, Horstmanshof, photo editor Kathleen Green, and a small team of editors in Redmond, Washington, sit down to choose the photos that will appear on the Bing home page.

Most Bing photos are travel or nature shots. The Bing team licenses them from stock agencies including Getty Images, Corbis (which, while owned by Bill Gates, has no business ties to Microsoft), age photostock, Photolibrary and others.

Editors looks for photos that lend themselves to interesting hotspots—little white squares that appear superimposed over the picture and display fun facts when you hover the mouse pointer over them.

“We see a lot of absolutely gorgeous pictures, but if they don’t make you want to find out more about it, it doesn’t go up,” Horstmanshof says. “That’s our biggest criteria. Does this make me want to know more?”

Bing editors do not consider submissions from individual photographers (though they recently held a Facebook contest to select a picture that will be displayed on August 3).

While the Bing name is new, the photo feature has been on Microsoft’s search page since July 2008, when the site was called Live Search.

To keep the site's performance from lagging—a big concern when Live Search first introduced the large photos—the page is designed to load the photograph after rendering the search box and other essential features.

Horstmanshof, who was a technical writer for Microsoft, got involved in editing photographs during the 2008 Olympics, when Live.com ran Olympics photos on its home page. “I made it very clear how much I loved this project,” she says.

So far, Bing's reach is small but growing. A recent comScore report said Microsoft had just 8.4 percent of the search market in June, in third place behind Yahoo! (19.6 percent) and Google (65 percent). But Microsoft's search queries jumped three percent between May and June, while Google's and Yahoo's fell.

Recent Bing photos
Bing keeps recent photographs online for about a week. Here are the descriptions and credits of pictures Bing used in the last few days.
- July 17: Moorea Island in the Pacific Ocean - Chad Ehlers/Photolibrary
- July 16: White-nosed Coati – Thomas Dressler/Photolibrary
- July 15:Reagan Tub Mill on Roaring Fork, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, TN – Jerry Whaley, age photostock
- July 14: Louvre Museum, Paris, France - Chad Ehlers/Photolibrary
- July 13: Central Park, New York - Walter Bibikow/Photolibrary
- July 12: Monarch butterflies migrating to Central Mexico – Richard Ellis/Getty Images
- July 11: Whitewater kayaking over waterfall – Randy Lincks/Photolibrary
- July 10: Travertine pools, Pamukkale, Turkey - Kordcom Kordcom/Photolibrary