Microsoft confirms Bing name and adds detail
Sometimes we at Blorge get things wrong, and this is one of those times. Contrary to our suspicions, Microsoft’s new search tool will indeed be called Bing rather than Kumo.
Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer confirmed the name at a conference in California this morning. He wasn’t 100 percent clear about the reason for choosing the name, noting, “I’m not the creative guy here”. However, judging from both Ballmer’s comments and a holding page for Bing.com, the hope appears to be that people will use ‘Bing’ as a verb, in the same way as ‘to Google’.
Ballmer says the rebranding was necessary because, like with Yahoo, the various MSN and Live sites were associated with a variety of tools. He wants Bing to be more like Google, which, although providing a range of services, is instantly recognized as a search engine.
The most notable point from a video demonstration Ballmer gave for the service – which appears set to completely replace Live Search – is that it is set up to minimize the number of users who leave the site. For example, video results are playable directly on the results page, while weather searches produce five-day forecasts without the user needing to follow a link.
Naturally that’s good news for Microsoft’s ad sales staff. However, Ballmer insists, “We’re not trying to profit off of anyone else’s work” and says he’s happy to talk to content providers who think they should get a cut of revenue when their data appears on a Bing page in this way.
The new search service has some particularly useful tools for fliers. As well as having real-time flight information built into the site, there is also a specific tool for searching for prices from different operators, including information about seasonal trends which attempts to forecast if current prices will rise or fall before the day of the flight.
The site is being billed as a “decision engine” rather than a search engine, with the tagline “Bing and decide”. It goes live on June 3 (next Wednesday).
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May 28th, 2009
One of the great feature of bing is auto compete feature, which is similar to Google, though being a blogger I would like to see some quality result from
Bing rather then people who game SEO and come at the the top of Google Search result. Lets hope for something new and useful this time from Microsoft