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When Google introduced their instant live search earlier this week, some curious web enthusiasts looked towards Bing to answer back at Google, including Long Zheng from istartedsomething.

Back in August 2009, Long Zheng developed a tool using Bing’s public API’s that gave the search engine an instant live search. What’s more shocking is, this could have easily been added to Bing, with as much as a simple JavaScript file, according to Zheng.

12-months later and Bing still hasn’t included any feature similar to instant search, however, during Apple WWDC 2010, Bing showed off a brand new version of the site, powered by HTML5 with some very exciting and cool features.

The early future Bing preview showed a smooth transition between your query and your results, a feature close to instant search. The HTML5 version of Bing also included a quick tab preview of weather, maps and other features just by hovering over the menus, reducing the amount of clicks and page loading.

The video also demonstrates a brand new mobile version of Bing, including endless image scrolling and seamless transitions between images, all using the iPhone or iPod’s touch screen. The mobile Bing preview also includes the background image, giving the appearance of a native app, all within Safari.

Bing in HTML5 could be Microsoft’s response to Google’s instant search, and we could likely see this being released by the first quarter of next year, right around the Internet Explorer 9 launch.

You may start seeing some familiar faces in Bing search results soon.

Microsoft deepened its corporate friendship with Facebook Wednesday, announcing tighter integration with the social network into Bing's search results.

Bing will display data from Facebook, such as user profiles and pages your friends have "Liked," to complement Web searches.
For example, if you search Bing for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 26-year-old chief executive, you might find a link to his personal profile, with buttons for sending him a message or adding him as a friend. That's in addition to the standard links to Wikipedia articles and news stories.

A link on that same results page to the website for "The Social Network" could show pictures of your friends who have inidicated on Facebook that they "Like" that movie.

The new Bing features will also show up in searches made from Facebook's website.

Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi was unambiguous about his excitement for the Facebook partnership.
"This is going to profoundly change how we search," Mehdi, the company's senior vice president for its online audience business, said at the news conference.

Last week Yahoo added new features to its search results pages, which are powered by Bing. In addition to slideshow enhancements and a new shortcuts feature, Yahoo began pulling in some photo albums from Facebook.

Despite advancements by rival search engines, market leader Google continues to gain.

Google was used for 66 percent of internet searches in September, according to market research firm comScore. During that period Yahoo had 17 percent and Bing had 11 percent, the report said.

But Google has struggled to form partnerships with Facebook. The search giant says it wants to tap into the social network's 500 million users.

Amongst all of the excitement with the launch of Internet Explorer 9 today, the Bing team made another presentation with the introduction of Bing in HTML5.

The updated search engine will answer back at Google’s instant search results with their very own kind of search improvements, including taking the power of HTML5 and introducing it into their home page.

The new improvements will allow for an animated home page using the Canvas HTML5 tag. Bing demonstrated an animated beach home page, where the water crashes onto the beach, all without the use of additional plug-ins or video.

We also showed off a preview video of the new Bing home page last week, with smooth transitions from the search page, to your actual results, all without reloading the page.

The video below shows just how the new Bing.com will work, with animated home pages, smooth transitions between the home page and your results, including hovering over tabs to show off content, to animated weather.

The new updated home page is expected to preview in a month, and expected to replace the existing home page within the next few months.