In its apparently unending quest to develop features that will allow it to compete more frontally with Google, Bing now allows you to track your rapidly declining net worth in more detail than ever before.

"Given the recent shock to our financial system we have seen more and more people interested in keeping track of what is happening with their money and with the stock market," Theo Vachovsky, Bing product manager, wrote in a Jan. 28 posting on the Bing Community blog. "Thus we developed an in-depth 'stock and funds pages' which covers most US stocks and funds."

Entering a stock ticker in Bing's main search box will result in an "Investor Data" tab appearing in the left-hand file bar. Click on that to display a page of financial data, displaying key metrics about the company. It's very reminiscent of what you find on Yahoo Finance, Google Finance and similar pages.

I've been testing it out for the past few minutes, and it seems to work consistently for major companies such as Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and, of course, Microsoft (MSFT). It doesn't seem to offer an "Investor Data" tab for Berkshire Hathaway, whose recent Class B stock split transformed it from "completely unobtainable" to "really expensive," but that could either be mistyping on my part or an odd kink in the system.

The ultimate beneficiaries of all this back-and-forth (or rather, feature add-on after feature add-on) are searchers themselves, who now have a greater degree of choice between Microsoft, Yahoo and Google when it comes to trying to discover information. I find in the course of any given day that I hop between all three sites--Google for news and searches, Bing for things like travel, and Yahoo for finance--in order to find the data I need. I'm just wondering whether the world's search engines will continue this trend of imitating one another into the future, or if at some point they'll begin to diverge with radically different offerings outside of core search.