Microsoft’s ambitious new search engine Bing went live to the public this weekend and there are already two useful Greasemonkey scripts that Firefox users can add to make the service much more useful. Adding these overlays onto Bing will take you less than two minutes and you’ll probably enjoy them a lot.
The first is much like our favorite Google script, which adds Twitter search results to the top of Google search results pages. Pennsylvania software developer, Billy DiStefano, published Twitter Search Results on Bing 30 minutes ago. Mattie Casper, a Principal Design Engineer at Citrix Systems, published a script called Bing Cleaner earlier this morning. Here’s what Bing looks like with these scripts running, and short instructions on installing them.
In the image above, Twitter search results are slapped onto the top of the results column and the related resources column is moved from the left of the page to the right. That’s a nice change as it makes search results the first thing the eye sees when starting on the left.
If you haven’t used any Greasemonkey scripts before, see the instructions and video in our post How to Use Greasemonkey in Less Than 5 Minutes. It’s just a browser plug-in and it’s really easy to use.
Once you have Greasemonkey installed, just visit the two script links above, click to install, and you are ready to rock and roll. I just added Bing to my Drag and Drop Zones search interface as well, so I’ll be able to give it a better test run.
We look forward to seeing what else the Greasemonkey community comes up with for Bing, but we suspect that these first two scripts will be the most useful.