Bing Rewards Xbox Gamers

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When the new Kinect-centric dashboard and interface rolled out onto Xbox 360's everywhere one of the really obvious and in-your-face additions was the Bing Search Box and Page that now commands the lofty position of the far-left screen on the Xbox 360 Dashboard -- giving Xbox Gamers a built-in search engine for the first time that now only allows them to search the hard drive on their console, but also the web, the LIVE Marketplace, and pretty much every other service that Microsoft owns or is connected to in any way that might have info or assets that relate to the game you searched on.

The average gamer reaction to that? It is about bloody time!

To test out this new feature on our 360 we typed in "Assassin's Creed Revelations" into the search box and it instantly kicked back an initial listing that included the game on our console, plus the Multiplyer Features Video, the Walkthrough, E3, GamesCom, and Mercy Trailers (as well as others), a link to the ACR Premium Theme on the Marketplace, and a link for AC: Lineave in Movies and an add for the Turtle Beach headset and mic themes and pictures.

When we clicked the "Show Everything" button we got the breakdown for what areas each of the listings appear from, making it a bit easier to decide what to look at if we were on the fence about that -- which you know, we were -- and happy day! We stumbled upon Toby Turner's "Literal Assassin's Creed: Revelations single that we otherwise would never have learned about... Of course in order to play it we had to wait while Zune got updated -- but there is always a hidden price to be paid for anything good or amusing, right? And adding the ability to search your console and the console-community for all things game is a good thing!

But seriously, adding the ability to search for game-related content seems like so obvious a no-brainer that you have to wonder what took them so long to implement this? And now that they have, the gnomes over at Bing and the Elves at LIVE want to make good and darn certain you are aware of it, so they came up with a new promotional program that not only highlights the search engine, but gives gamers rewards in the form of Microsoft Points that they can use to buy content on the Marketplace -- just for using Bing! Well, using Bing and for joining the program that is.

Before you can get started searching Bing and scoring yourself some tasty Microsoft Points you will need to load your web browser and head over to www.discoverbing.com/rewards/web/gaming -- where you will find the home page for the reward program and a honking huge button to push in order to join it!