YouTube might never be dethroned as the king of online video, but Microsoft has just made a compelling case for visiting Bing before you watch anything on YouTube.

Microsoft gave a much-needed makeover to its Bing video search feature this week, and the final product is pretty good. It features larger, easier-to-identify video thumbnails, and you can even preview videos straight from the results to get an idea of what you're looking at. Just hover your cursor over a result to watch a small bit of the video.

Bing now shows additional information on each result, as well, to bring it up to par with YouTube. Specifically, you can now see the view count, upload date, and uploader before clicking through to the result.

The search pages one-up YouTube with some really helpful related search suggestions. Music searches will show a module up at the top for the artist with a photo and a list of other top songs. Watching a video for any of those other songs is just a click away. More suggested videos — even if they don't specifically match your search — will show up half-way down the page in another module, with more recommendations all the way at the end.

That new feature is just one of a few changes that focus on music videos. Searches for songs will now highlight the "best" result with an extra-large preview. These results are chosen based on relevance and popularity. And you can watch the entire video straight from the search result if you so please.

And, of course, Bing pulls in results from around the web, not just YouTube. Google, too, of course, has its own general video search tool on google.com that pulls in results from multiple sources. But that product is dated and lacks many of the features introduced by Bing's latest update.

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