14 DAY TRIAL // Bing is Microsoft's answer to all competitive search engines. And at the same time, the Redmond company's service to beat search engines, is not a “search engine.” Bing is a “decision engine,” the software giant claims, aiming to catalyze a change in user perception and make the evolution of Live Search stand out from the crowd. But of course Bing is about closing the gap separating Microsoft from Google on the search engine and online advertising markets, just as it is the result of the company's commitment to grow organically following the failed acquisition of Yahoo in 2008. The Bing website went live, mind you not in a Windows Live or a Live Search sense, on May 28, 2009, but the actual search decision engine will not go live until June 3rd, for the public.
“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” explained Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. “When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”
For Microsoft it is not just about reinventing its search engine, but also about delivering a new consumer brand. The company has acknowledged repeatedly that Live Search suffered from a branding perspective, and Bing is the answer. Investments between $80 million and $100 million have been poured into marketing Bing as a new way to search.
Bing is positioned as a filter for the information overload users have to navigate with traditional search engines. In this regard, Bing is by no means reinventing the search wheel. The search decision engine will still return results based on the content indexed by its crawler. But the promise from Microsoft is that the indexed content is better than before and that the user experience has evolved with the inclusion of a range of tools allowing for the narrowing down of results. Increased relevancy, a new way to organize search results, task simplification and greater insight are among the results that Bing is aiming for. Whether users will end up binging over googling will confirm or deny the relevance of Microsoft's efforts in search.
