Microsoft launches Bing.com as its new search engine
The rumours turned out to be true, and Microsoft has duly announced a new and rebranded version of its Live Search system
The new four-letter word in your life is Bing. Whether you'll bother to try it or not, Microsoft has great hopes for it. Bing is the latest iteration of Microsoft's search engine, and it's innovative enough for Microsoft to try to rebrand what used to be called Live Search and spend around $80-$100m on promotion.
Bing was announced today by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer at D7, the conference run by the Wall Street Journal's technology site, All Things Digital. Microsoft's staff have been using it for many months under a different name: Kumo.
It will be available to American users next Wednesday, 3 June, and UK users should have access to a beta version.
The new search engine has a number of innovative features, the main one being what Microsoft calls the Explorer pane on the left hand side. When you search for things, the Explorer pane finds results for related searches. This should be a big help for less experienced searches who aren't adept at querying search engines.
Microsoft has tried to make its search engine smarter and it makes assumptions based on real-world information sources, such as the MSN Calendar. For example, Bing provides different results if you search for Wimbledon during the tennis season or Cannes during the film festival than if you search for the same terms at Christmas.
The results are also designed to surface the sort of things people typically search for, such as phone numbers, that may be buried several layers down in a site. Try searching for British Airways, for example. Many hotel and restaurant searches show the same approach.
Another useful feature is the ability to preview text results from a site by rolling the mouse over the result instead of going to the site. Text is used because it's more legible and more useful than thumbnail page previews.
When I tried the new search engine earlier, under a Non Disclosure Agreement, Microsoft UK's Paul Stoddart said that Microsoft didn't depend on collecting clicks to show adverts, so it had tried to eliminate the need for multiple searches to find things. It was therefore trying to eliminate clicks and show people what they wanted.
"Let's not force ads down people's throats all the time," he said.
However, you don't need to log on to get the benefits: the aim is to deliver the best results for the mass market, rather than for particular users.
Some features of the new UK version will already be familiar to US users, such as the use of large pictures with hot-spots instead of a Google-style white background.
Stoddart says that important parts of Bing's technology have been contributed by Microsoft Research in Cambridge, and that Microsoft has about 60 engineers working on the UK version. "They're going to add things to make it a really great search engine for the British market. But we don't want to go after the market until we can deliver. That's going to take us a few months."
Alex Hoye, chief executive of Latitude, a company that specialises in search engine marketing and pay-per-click advertising, says: "This is the first thing we've seen in a long time that has things Google doesn't have. That's nice to see."
Hoye says: "User-friendliness is probably the most notable change, together with the galleries that do phrase matches [the Explorer pane]. It's not cluttered and annoying."
Whether Bing will be a success remains to be seen, but Hoye argues that Microsoft has to take a bold approach just to stay where it is, let alone catch up with Yahoo or Google.
"In 2004, if this was side-by-side with Google, it would be very competitive. In 2009, it's not a level playing field," he says.
Google has a huge market dominance, and people believe it delivers the best search results, regardless of whether it's true or not.
Competing with Google is almost impossible in the short term, and Microsoft is one of the few companies rich enough to tackle it over the long haul. Delivering search profitably could be an even bigger problem.
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks