Microsoft hopes Bing is road to search success

 

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Posted on 29 May 2009 at 07:36

Microsoft has revealed that its revamped search engine will be called Bing and will launch at the beginning of June.

The company has been testing Bing internally under the codename Kumo for several months, and says it will be backing the launch with a $100 million ad campaign. Currently bing.com points to a “coming soon” page and UK internet users will have to wait until 1 June to get a preview before the service goes fully live two days later.

Microsoft says that Bing has been developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through search result overload. Citing results from a study by comScore, the company says that as many as 30% of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result.

“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,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive. “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.”

The comScore data also showed that approximately two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement or a fresh query. Microsoft’s answer to this is a new Explorer pane on the left hand side of the screen. When you enter a search term into the main window, the Explorer pane lists related searches. Quite how this is different to the related searches long-offered by Google, Ask and Yahoo isn’t explained. For that we will have to wait until Bing goes live.

Other features includes date-sensitive results. Bing will now run every query past a calender of important dates so that if you type in Liverpool, for example, and it discovers a Champions League match featuring Liverpool is playing that day, it will promote that result to the top of the list.

Bing will also show a preview of each site in its results, accessed by holding the mouse over a search result. Microsoft has also integrated the shopping comparison service Ciao into the site, allowing it to display various prices when you enter a product name.

Microsoft will be hoping these features will be enough for it to close the gap with Google, which currently commands around two-thirds of the lucrative search market. It is a big ask, given that Microsoft, with less than 10%, is not even in second place. If Bing does not have the impact it is hoping for, Microsoft may yet rekindle its interest in Yahoo, Google’s closest competitor.

Author: Simon Aughton / Stuart Turton