Does Microsoft’s new search engine have the ability to challenge Google?

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, has just been launched. Bing is now available at www.bing.com and is a direct replacement for Live Search/MSN.

Microsoft is expected to spend $80 million to $100 million on marketing Bing and is more likely to take market share from Yahoo rather than Google.

Whether Bing will ultimately succeed or not, it will help to push Google into continuing to develop their search engine product, and the new pay per click competition will ensure that Google doesn’t get too greedy.

According to Microsoft’s, Steve Ballmer, “Bing is a new kind of search that goes beyond traditional search engines to help you make faster, more informed decisions. It will do this by combining a great search engine (with powerful new features to improve your results for any query), more organised results, and unique tools to help you make important decisions. We think of Bing as a Decision Engine.”

“So why did we pick Bing as the new brand name? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. It needed to be like the product — optimised for the Internet. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world. We like Bing because it sounds off in our heads when we think about that moment of discovery and decision making — when you resolve those important tasks. And frankly, the name needed to clearly communicate that this is something new, to invite you to come back, to re-introduce you to our new and improved service and encourage you to give it a try.”

So, how is Bing different from Google?

• Bing is not dramatically different from Google, but some people have found its results more accurate.
• In addition to the standard search results, Bing shows more detailed information about a specific web page when you hover your mouse pointer at the right side of the search results. This is a great feature.
• Bing will display fewer results if it is certain that it has understood your intent. The search for “Facebook”, for example, brings up just one result.
• Some search results are divided into categories. For example, if you search for “Elton John” you will be offered results in the categories Photo, Songs, Lyrics, Tickets, Concerts, Musical, Las Vegas and Albums.
• Bing features a different background image every day.
• Bing’s video search lets you watch videos without leaving the search engine.
• Bing appears able to handle misspellings reasonably well and returned the correct results for our test.

All in all I think this is a great effort from Microsoft and a major improvement on the previous Live Search/MSN versions.

Why not see for your self and take a test drive now at www.bing.com.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 09:27 and is filed under Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.