Bing, you're making me give up on you - and possibly Windows Phone as well

Bing keeps talking big with campaigns like the Bing It On challenge, but continues to fail to deliver.

The two most asked for controls  are the ability to narrow and sort results by date. In theory this is now available but it's unreliable, and decides to disappear when you most need it.

It's clear to me that the date functionality must be fairly shaky and Bing chooses to selectively hide it away in situations they think it will produce bad results. Unfortunately working around this limitation makes using Bing feel like hard work compared to the effortless experience of using the Google date controls.

In some cases narrow by date can be forced by adding &tbs=qdr:d to the url. But how hard would it have been to provide a GUI setting for this?

What's worse, the date controls are completely unavailable in many countries. One of the most infuriating aspects of Bing is the glacially slow country rollout. Many countries like Singapore are still waiting for Bing to provide such basics as local news. But sometimes the limitations are subtler - try switching to your country to Australia. You'll find a Bing home page that superficially looks as feature-rich as the US. However as soon as you try force-enabling narrow by date, you'll find that you can't.

Windows Phone 7 currently has Bing baked into it, and it's very hard to change the default search provider. I don't expect Windows Phone 8 to change this situation, which means the success of Windows Phone 8 is heavily tied to Bing. Windows Phones are sold globally, so Bing must perform globally if Windows Phone is to avoid becoming a US-only sideshow. At the very least Bing must achieve worldwide parity with Google on the search functionality.