Microsoft has attempted to re-energize the search engine race by introducing Bing, its own new search engine. Like many other Microsoft products before Bing, the company has done a pretty good job of stealing ideas from other innovative companies -- from Clusty to Kayak to even Google. And it put a pretty face on the new product.

But introducing Bing didn't answer the most relevant question: Who needs (or wants) another search engine?

The only real answer for that question would be to provide a search engine that would actually be worthy of using instead of Google -- one that would be so compelling that we'd want to change our habits to use it.

Bing isn't that search engine. It's just another nice Web site. If it wasn't Microsoft that was launching it, you'd probably never even hear of it. Not because it doesn't have good ideas. It's just not earth shattering -- and that's what it would take for most people to break their Google habits.

Although Microsoft is positioning Bing as a decision engine, it actually plays like a bunch of individual applications, each with interfaces that are together and sometimes look and feel similar.

The travel portion of Bing demonstrates the good and the bad. If you type "Flights from Pittsburgh to Orlando" on the search field on the Bing home page, you get a typical search engine results list. I did that search on Bing, then on ask.com, and got similar results.

When you scroll over a result on Bing, it displays a shape to its right. Hover your cursor over that shape to see a preview of what's on the page behind the link. It's a lot like the images that ask.com used to pop up, which also is like the results we used to get in those look-ahead browsers that predated Internet Explorer and Firefox. But those never made it big in the market. Most are long gone.

You also can click on the travel link in Bing to find your flights (instead of using the search bar). This gives you a page that looks a lot like Kayak.com, one of my favorite travel Web sites. Here you can search for flights directly (or search for hotels or car rentals) by entering your requirements in fields specific to searching for a flight. This feels so much like Kayak that without asking, I assumed Microsoft licensed the technology from Kayak. Can you say "eerily similar"?

Other sections stand out a bit more from Microsoft's competitors, but they steal liberally. The maps section has all the same capabilities as Google maps or Mapquest but feels faster and displays the info in a slightly different way. The images section involves a long, never-ending page instead of having you look at a pre-defined number of images before clicking to the next page.

Microsoft has used this paradigm many times, and each time I see it, it annoys me because it feels like falling into a bottomless pit. Scrolling over the images pulls up a larger image. Unlike similar functions on photo Web sites where the larger images help you see the details better, Bing grows the image only a small amount -- perhaps 10 percent -- and that doesn't help much.

Give Microsoft credit for breaking down the results according to category, much like Vivismo's Clusty search engine, and for putting advance search within easy reach. But it doesn't do as good a job of categorizing as Clusty.

Taken together, Bing does not deliver a bunch of cherries; but at least it doesn't give us sour grapes.