The main Bing homepage will be the quintessential starting point into a world of wiser decision-making.

SHOWCASE: Microsoft is set to unveil Bing.com fully on June 3 - its latest incarnation of what the next landscape of search should be. While the company prefers to classify the Bing service as a ‘decision engine’, the intention is to position it as ‘not just another search engine’. See here for a quick video ad on what Bing is about.

Microsoft intends for Bing to build on the benefits of today’s search engines but move beyond this with a new approach to user experience with intuitive tools that allow for better decision-making. The site will initially focus on four key verticals: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business.

Here’s a quick video explaining the philosophy behind Microsoft’s Bing. This video requires Silverlight which you can download here.

In summary, Microsoft wants Bing to produce:

• Great search results - by identifying relevant search results through features like Best Match; Deep Links that provide insight into the resources within the site; Quick Preview, which is a hover-over window that expands over the search result caption for relevancy.
• Organized search experience - by reducing complex, multi-query and multi-session searches. There’s the Explore Pane, which gives search tools on the left side of the page; Web Groups, which groups results intuitively; Related Searches and Quick Tabs, which provides a contents table for different categories of search results.
• Simplify tasks and provide insight - by focusing on four verticals in shopping, travel, local business and information, and health-related research. The Bing Decision Engine is optimized for these key customer scenarios. For example, when a consumer uses Bing to shop online, the Sentiment Extraction feature scours the Internet for opinions and reviews to give the searcher informed analytical data to make the decision quickly. In Bing Travel, the Rate Key compares location, price and amenities of multiple hotels and provides color-coded key of the best values while the Price Predictor actually projects the fluctuations of airline ticket prices so that consumers can decide if buying the ticket now or later is the best option.

“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.

“When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”

Here’s a quick showcase of some screenshots of Microsoft’s upcoming Bing ‘decision engine’: