Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first unveiled Bing last Thursday at the D: All Things Digital conference in Aviara, Calif.

ChannelWeb.com last Friday took a look at five things that would help Bing succeed, but now that we've had a chance to put it through its paces, here's what we found:

Already, we have to give it points for visual presentation: the home page of the beta version is neat, easy on the eyes, and above all, welcoming. We lead off our inaugural test drive with a generic search for our beloved Boston Red Sox, and the bar on the left side of the results page listed Red Sox categories -- schedule, rumors, spring training, merchandise, history, news, images, videos -- followed by a list of related searches. The main search function listed the weekend's scores from a series with the Toronto Blue Jays, as well as the Sox' current record, their place in the American League East standings and two quick news items, followed by the link to the Red Sox' actual Major League Baseball home page. Beyond that is a fairly standard listing of blue links with minimally helpfl text blurbs beneath each, but we'll admit we did like having a lot of information organized at the top of the search results screen.

As expected, Bing's main search page also lists broad category searches like shopping, news, maps and travel. In the Bing announcement last week, we'd also been advised we'd be seeing search categories for "health" and "local" as well, but on the main Bing page, it's not clear where to find those. On a quick glance, the main "shopping" page offers a tour and shows users how to link to reviews, and then has a collection of featured products, which on Monday included -- shocking! -- Microsoft's Zune media player, women's watches, a Sharp LCD TV, and a Craftsman tool set. Credit Microsoft for listing Apple's iPod Touch underneath Zune on a small list of "must have gadgets," too.

We'll leave a deep dive review to the intrepid ChannelWeb Test Center, but early buzz around the blogosphere has tilted in Bing's favor. Over on TechCrunch, which was one of the first outlets to report Bing's early debut, comments ranged from "So long Google ... I'm a Binger now" to "wow .... bing is good ... surprise coming from Microsoft," with several comments applauding Bing's image search.