14 DAY TRIAL // On May 28, 2009, Microsoft introduced not only a new search decision engine, but also a fresh consumer brand, rising from the ashes of the now defunct Live Search. But even before Bing was rolling out worldwide, the Redmond company debuted plans to bring the public's focus on the new brand. June 3rd, 2009 is the last day of the Bing rollout, with the search decision engine now available globally. At the bottom of this article you will be able to find the first Bing video advertisement for television out of the marketing effort which will include traditional media outlets. From the get go, Microsoft emphasized that Bing was designed to stand out from the search engine crowd by simply providing a solution to information overload. For this, the Redmond company did not hesitate in the least to kill Live Search.
The ad debuts with a slap in the face of all pre-Bing search engines. The global economic crisis, a factor that users have a deep and immediate reaction to, is associated with searches that lead nowhere and with people lost in the links, and inherently with now traditional search engines: Google, Yahoo, etc. “We don't need queries and keywords if they bring back questions and confusion,” the ad states just before announcing Bing as the ultimate panacea that will bring the end to search overload.
“To give you a sense of what we mean when we say "information overload": In 1997 there were around 26M pages (URLs) on the Web. Today we estimate there are more than 1 trillion pages of content. In 1997 the Web was mostly text. Today it combines video, images, music, with new data formats emerging every day. The amount of available data has grown exponentially. An average person would need six hundred thousand decades of nonstop reading to read through the information. This has led people to experience information overload, so it's no surprise that they are increasingly turning to – and more importantly – depending on search to help navigate and use the breadth and depth of Web content,” explained Satya Nadella, senior vice president, Research and Development, Online Services Division.