What was the former name of MS Bing, the rebuilt search engine from Microsoft?”
Google owns 90 per cent of the search engine market. Microsoft comes a distant third, behind Yahoo! with single figure market share. Bing, which rebrands Microsoft’s Live Search, and adds a dollop of new features, is Microsoft’s attempt at throwing down the gauntlet to Google and providing competition in the search engine market. Bing launches next Wednesday, June 3rd, and Microsoft’s local partner, ninemsn, says that it isn’t expecting any flash and bang when it comes to acquiring visitors. “We’re only expecting a few per cent a year,” said Alex Parsons, ninemsn head of products.
At the All Things D conference on Thursday, Microsoft unveiled the latest re-branding of its search engine. Forget Live Search–that’s so three months ago. Now Bing is in! Launching in a couple of weeks, Bing hopes to make searching a little more useful and, judging from this video demo (warning: video contains Steve Ballmer), it looks a bit like the love-child of Google and WolframAlpha. Microsoft is calling Bing a “decision engine,” thanks to some features that aim to help you find the information you want sooner. When searching for an item, Bing will highlight the official Web site of that term (so if you were searching for “Mac,” Apple.com would be highlighted at the top of the search results, with the rest displayed below). Bing goes a step beyond that by actually listing commonly-used information from the sites in the results themselves. For example, if you search for “Amazon customer service,” Bing will return the Web site but also s
Microsoft on Thursday took the wraps off Bing, the rebranded and rebuilt search engine formerly code-named Kumo, designed to replace Live Search. It’s a solid improvement over the previous search product, and it beats Google in important areas. It will help Microsoft gain share in the search business. It’s surprisingly competitive with Google.
