Have you ever heard about a new song that you wanted to listen to but did not want to purchase it or subscribe to a music service to do so?  Sure, you can go to Amazon or iTunes and listen to a small segment of the song but that is usually less than satisfying.  Now the search engine Bing has made another shot across the bow of Google and Yahoo by offering users the chance to listen to an entire song for free (once) when they find it through a Bing search. 

For example, go to Bing.com and do a search for "listen to (insert name of song here)".  If the song you are searching for is in the database it will come up at the top of the search results along with little Play icons and track lengths.  Unfortunately at the time of the writing of this post it appears that they do not have the service fully operational (or maybe it got hammered by too much traffic?).  When you click on the play icons you get a popup saying that Bing and Zune are working together to improve your user experience. 

Still, this has some potential to it if they ever get it up and running properly.  According to the Microsoft press release in addition to music tracks Bing will also be offering access to over one thousand different television shows and online games as well.  Once you watch your freebie you have to subscribe to the Zune subscription service if you want to view/watch it again though.  At fifteen dollars a month that seems a bit steep (especially if you are not using a Zune portable media player) but it will probably be comparable to the anticipated iTunes online audio service that some are expecting since they bought out and shut down Lala.