The Channel Wire

May 28, 2009

Microsoft Thursday took the wraps off its new search engine, which is indeed called Bing and replaces Microsoft's Live Search brand. Formerly known as Kumo -- the name assigned to the search engine while in development -- Bing will spearhead Microsoft's strategy to supplant Google, Yahoo and other companies as the go-to search engine for consumers.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled Bing at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif., hosted by The Wall Street Journal. According to Journal reports, Bing will be made available to the public on June 3, and Microsoft chose the name "Bing" because it's short, works globally and is easy to say and remember.

"We want to do better," Ballmer said at the conference, according to the Journal. "There are times in our history where we've felt a little bit like Rocky. It takes persistence. You don't always get things right."

Microsoft lags far behind Google in terms of overall search share; the latest numbers for April from Web traffic researcher comScore puts Google's share of searches in the United States at 64.2 percent and Microsoft's at 8.2 percent. So it's clear that to compete with the Google search behemoth, Bing needs a difference maker.

Microsoft suggested to the Journal that it offers a deeper search experience than Google by giving users a range of categories to search. The specific categories are shopping, local, travel and health, and if a user searches under one of those categories, its search results will be specific to those broad categories. A shopping search, for example, would list results by price and availability, whereas a medical search would list results by symptoms or, say, medical journals.

Some of Bing's features were described in a Microsoft blog post back in March, including a links bar on the left hand side of a Bing search page. Microsoft also confirmed at the D: All Things Digital announcement that its Virtual Earth mapping platform will be rebranded as Bing Maps for Enterprise, and that it will use technology from Farecast -- the company it acquired in April 2008 -- in Bing Travel, according to reports. Many of Microsoft's recent acquisitions would seem to play a role in Bing, such as its July 2008 acquisition of Powerset, a developer of semantic search technology.

It may be Microsoft's size and marketing savvy -- not Bing's functionality, per se -- that propels Bing forward. As ChannelWeb Editor/News Steve Burke reminded us Wednesday, Microsoft is still three times the size of Google and can go toe-to-toe with anyone when marketing hardball is called for. Ad Age already reported this week that a Bing advertising blitz worth as much as $100 million is in the works from Microsoft and ad firm JWT is set to touch everything from print and online media to TV and billboards.

Last, could more partnerships be in the offing? A research note earlier this week from Jeffries & Company analyst Katherine Egbert suggested that Microsoft will likely partner with others to boost Bing's viability. The fact that Microsoft and Yahoo are still talking about a partnership -- if not an all-out acquisition -- is definitely telling. According to the Journal, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was at D: All Things Digital reiterating that Yahoo was still open to making a deal with the software titan.