Options on the left-side panel let you limit the image results in various ways: by size, by graphic type, even “just faces” or “head & shoulders” shots. Amazing.

As on Google, you can search for videos. But on Bing, you can preview the results far more efficiently. Just point to a thumbnail (without clicking) in the search results, and the video begins to play back sample segments, seven seconds at a time, right there on the thumbnail.

The rest of Bing’s advantages are supposed to stem from four huge search categories: travel, shopping, health and local business information. These sorts of searches produce special displays that trounce Google’s eye-glazing text lists  sometimes.

When you’re shopping for a particular product  “Canon SD870,” for example  the top result is a tidy chart, summarizing everything you’d want to know: a photo, price, average rating, and even a Photo Quality graph.

(Bing’s Shopping results also make it clear when you’ll get 1 to 5 percent cash back, courtesy of Microsoft’s Cashback program. In essence, Microsoft passes on to you some of the bounty that it receives from 540 online advertisers, such as J&R, Hewlett-Packard, Gap and others. Paying you to use Bing for shopping feels desperate and even a little sleazy on Microsoft’s part, but it’s real money, and you may as well exploit it while it lasts.)

When you search for a flight, a similar table offers the cheapest fare (“$259 JFK>LAX”) and links to other deals. An icon tells you whether prices are about to go up, down or stay the same. That detail is brought to you by Farecast.com, which Microsoft bought last year for $115 million.

Unfortunately, these features don’t always work. You get the shopping info summary with “Canon SD870,” but not “Nikon D5000,” let alone “Palm Pre,” “TiVo HD” or “iPod Nano.” (Microsoft points out that the summary table appears more often if you click the Shopping link before you search. But come on, who has time for that?)