A search engine called Bing
In its quest to try to wrest some of the search market from Google, Microsoft has once again reinvented its search engine. MSN Search was first reborn as Live Search, spent a few months under the name Kumo, and now it has been re-branded as Bing.
Microsoft, like Yahoo and other search engine providers, is a poor second to Google. Google is so dominant that "to google" has entered the language as a verb. Perhaps this is part of Microsoft's thinking in choosing a name which could be embraced by popular culture and verbalised. Perhaps it is also taking a leaf out of Google's book in applying the "BETA" label to its home page. Many of Google's products seem to be permanently labelled as beta versions.
The big strength of Google, the reason it swept aside the other search engines when it burst onto the scene was that it was, and still is, extraordinarily simple. Using Google isn't a visual experience and you are not overwhelmed with options and menus. You type in a phrase, and you get an easy to read list of answers. Its fast, its simple, and it gives good results.
My first impressions of Bing are that it is simply a slightly more modern looking Google. Like Google it has a simple search box. Like Google it offers to search the whole web or just pages from your own country. Like Google, it has options for Web, Images, Video, News, Maps, Images and More. Unlike Google, where "More" really does give more options, the "More" on Bing doesn't give anything extra at the moment.
So how does Microsoft describe Bing? It doesn't call it a Search Engine, but prefers to call it a Decision Engine which gives a multimedia search experience. It does offer some minor advances over Google in that hovering the mouse over a search result causes it pop up a balloon giving more text from that page whilst video searches results consist of a set of thumbnails which begin playing at thumbnail size when you hold the mouse over them. Sometimes this is useful, but at other times it is distracting. Such features are superficial. If they prove popular it will only be a matter of time before Google sports the same dressings.
Microsoft is running a $100 million dollar campaign worldwide to promote awareness of Bing, to get people using it, and most importantly to get advertisers spending on it, but unless it can come up with something better than Google, better and more relevant search results, then I don't see any compelling reason why people will switch.
24th June 2009
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