Microsoft's Search engine "Bing"

[Dr.Jones]

Microsoft's hot on the heels to hype Bing at par with Google. With arrival of the much awaited Google killer nearing, things are opening up at their own pace. Bing is Microsoft's answer to all competitive search engines. Bing.com will go live on June 3. 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. Demonstrated by Microsoft Senior Vice-President Yusuf Mehdi, Bing was unveiled with the inevitable gag video—a portentous-sounding narrator called search "the final frontier" and noted it was a "five, six, uh, multiyear mission"— prominently featuring James Gandolfini reprising his role as Tony Soprano to say "bing" before concluding with a cheery "back to you, Steve."

The Behind Bing section of the Discover Bing site includes videos of four of the key players. This is also one site to watch if you want to incorporate Bing's API's in your products.You can also download the Desktop product guide application.The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That's a big campaign -- big compared with consumer-product launches and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting.

Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer said,"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.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."

Above all, the remarkable thing about Bing is that it has been able to narrow the gap between Goolge and Live Search. Well, that doesn't qualify Bing to topple the reining search-giant.When you want to shop for an item, both services have very strong "shopping" tabs that organize results well. Google gives you seller ratings, which Bing doesn't. But Bing offers a cashback program, which is hard to beat.

[Johnny]

As All Things Digital's Walt Mossberg said onstage, they're essentially "blue results on a white background," right down to the search ads appearing on the right side of the screen. But Bing also displays a tabbed tool bar, along the left side of results, that directs users to more topical results based on what they're searching for.The assessments of Kumo,now Bing suggests that it's a far more sophisticated and refined search engine than Live Search. There are no freaky issues or missing links to complain about.

To be more precise, except for some instances Bing was at par with Goolge for most casual results.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. There's a range of features dropping down the table of content on the top left column. Bing offers Google-like search types including video, news, images and maps. Going down further you can access the search history, which would be enhanced further in some interesting ways.

With the content of search results, Bing is not always superior than Google except for some. In most of the searches Google results were more relevant and useful. Although not too superior than Google, Bing is a much sophisticated and advanced as a search engine.To be fair to Google, you can also click through to Google News on any result and sort results by date. But that's extra clicks. Bing is more aggressive about including news.And in some searches, Bing won on results outright. When searching for "Facebook sandberg" on Google, the top link was a story from 2008.

Sandeep Aggarwal, senior Internet research analyst with Collins Stewart LLC, said Bing may have chance at becoming a "destination" Web site like Google, because the site's technology has been better tested. People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won't go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they'll focus on planting the idea that today's search engines don't work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search really solves their problems.

[Damiano]

It's obvious that Bing doesn't have the depth or freshness of Google's results, but that's not too surprising in a search engine that hasn't actually been launched yet. Bing's features won loud applause several times from a tough, tech-savvy crowd that was not as generous to other product demonstrations at this conference. One Bing feature popular with the crowd was how the search engine, when prompted to search a major company's name, will pull up a customer-service number for that company and display it prominently in the search results.

All search engines have their strengths, and many of Bing's lie in areas where Microsoft has its own content companies. For example, Microsoft owns the airfare prediction service Farecast, and it includes Farecast buying advice whenever you search for airplane travel. Bing also displays some medical data inside the search engine itself.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. Investments between $80 million and $100 million have been poured into marketing Bing as a new way to search.