You’ll be forgiven for being a bit confused about the emergence of the newest search engine on the scene – Bing! Officially announced yesterday by Steve Ballmer at the D7 conference, Bing is Microsoft’s latest attempt to refocus their search efforts, and will be launching on the 3rd of June. Until this week, most within the SEO industry were aware that Microsoft were up to something , but we’d all become quite familiar with the previous codename assigned to the project; Kumo. So it came as quite a shock when rumours started to surface that they were changing the name to Bing.
So why Bing? Over at the Live Search blog, Bing was announced on a post humourously titled “The Sound of Found – Bing”. They go on to say:
“We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. It needed to be like the product — optimized 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”
Within Ballmer’s speech, he talks about the fact that “Bing” works internationally. It also works as a verb – “I’ll Bing you later”, in the way that Live and MSN never did. When I first heard the name Bing I thought it was ridiculous, but it kind of reminds me how people scoffed when Nintendo announced the Wii – and see how well that’s caught on, eh? I think Bing’s definitely got legs.
Microsoft’s search offering has long been blighted by confusing branding, and has appeared in various guises:
• Microsoft Search
• MSN Search
• Live Search
• Windows Live Search
so it’s good to see them distance themselves from previous incarnations. It will be very interesting to see how the move away from their existing brand equity will affect them, although I’m sure the reported $100 million advertising campaign will do no harm. In case you’re not aware, that figure is big – 4 times what Google spent on all their advertising last year!
Microsoft is also taking the move to reposition their search offering. They no longer use the phrase “search engine” – instead, Bing is a “decision engine”, confidently stating that “the world doesn’t need another search engine – it needs a decision engine.”
For me, a good search engine is more than just a verb. It has to deliver good relevant results. That’s what Google did, and the verb came (quite unexpectedly) after. And this is where Microsoft has always fallen down. Within 2 searches, I quickly found an excellent example to help me illustrate Microsoft’s flaws:
These are the results for the query “cheap mens trousers”. I’ve highlighted the results I think are unsuitable. If I’m searching for trousers, why am I being shown websites about shoes and golf shirts? It’s important that Microsoft iron out these bugs in the algorithm when Bing is launched, or pay more attention to this moving forward than they appear to have done in the past.
All this, however, may be in vain. Adage noted that:
“Google has conducted internal tests, according to people familiar with them, in which the company put its logo and treatment on another engine’s search results. Users still prefer the results with the Google logo, even if they’re not Google results”
So perhaps they should simply use that $100 million to pay for the use of Google’s logo? It’s certainly interesting times in the search engine world with the advent of Bing, Wolfram Alpha, and real time search. I really hope Bing is a success – anything to shake up the search engine landscape and reduce Google’s market share has to be a good thing.
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June 1st, 2009 at 9:31 am
Bing (beta) is now live.
June 1st, 2009 at 12:30 pm
LOL – “Bing means ‘disease’ in Chinese”! http://www.brandinfection.com/2009/05/29/bing-means-disease-in-chinese/
June 1st, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Unimpressed, won’t be switching from Google for now. Search for cheap mens trousers still returns irrelevant results (http://connect.icrossing.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/cheaptrousers2.png) and why does igindex rank for ‘icrossing’
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:48 am
OK do you want the geeky reason why BING is called BING? You’re going to get it anyway.
BING as well as being a rebrand, is a significant rework of the listing algorithm. The latest algorithm alledgedly has lots of recursive mathemetics functions in it like the Ackermann Function.
This form of recursive maths can be used to identify whether set of numbers are subsets or supersets of other groups of numbers and can also be applied to content to see if web site copy is a super set of subset of other content.
This is supposed to rapidly identify duplicate content, link relevance and a whole lot more to improve the accuracy of results.
Microsoft techies suggested a recursive acronym to pay homage to the underlying maths….
What does BING stand for? Bing Is Not Google., but what does that BING stand for? BING is not Google, ad infinitum….
June 4th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Google dominates search to such a degree I think it is more out of hope for an interesting story that mainstream news has positioned bing as a challenger. The analytics data doesn’t lie. As far as I can see Google snags 90%+ share. I’m aware of bing but that doens’t mean I’m going to switch to it… there simply isn’t enough of a differentiation from what already works well for me.
See this post on my blog for where the 90% figure comes from.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Early days for me, but 2 observations. Love the big picture idea, but it does run the danger of looking too stock photography very quickly. Can we have version where it can load my images please! Secondly I quite like the ‘preview dot’ next to each search where you can see some of the sites content before you click. You can tell I’m all ‘judge a book by it’s cover’ type of person.
If there was a jury, they’d be out.
June 8th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Hitwise have released some stats around bing:
Top UK search term on Bing last week was ‘facebook’, 2nd was ‘google’- is that because they couldn’t find what they were looking for on bing?
New search engine is UK’s 3rd biggest, av. visit time increasing, most traffic from Microsoft properties
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2009/06/initial_bing_stats.html
June 16th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Apparently Google are hiring a team to investigate Bing’s algorithm. Sounds like they could be getting worried. Brand republic have covered it here.
Personally i’ve been quite impressed with the results, especially when i’ve used Michael Kordahi’s blind search test.
It will be interesting to see market share figures especially when their UK campaign ramps up at the end of the year!
June 18th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Talking about market share, the IAB have just put this news article out. Bing has received a continued positive market reaction.
Bing’s market share has continued to grow two weeks after launch. from 9.1% market share to 12.1% in the second week.
August 5th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Should have called it ding not bing………
October 21st, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Bing does give search results much like Google but i would have to say that Google still gives more relevant search results