Bing = Bingo?
Jinfo Blog

31st May 2009

By Udo Hohlfeld

Item

Bing does not equal 'Bingo'. The new search engine promoted by Microsoft this week is named Bing. With this completely reworked search service, Microsoft again attacks market leader Google and second place Yahoo to win over market share in the profitable internet search business. Bing is to be launched in the United States on June 3. Search plays a prominent and important role in Microsoft's huge product portfolio - hence the continued investment to catch up in this space. 'Instant answer' is one of the new features. A search for 'Oscar' will directly bring up an overview of the most recent winners; a search for 'weather detroit' will bring up a detailed weather forecast for Detroit - the user does not have to click through complex link lists any longer. Whereas Microsoft sees huge advantages with such actually quite conventional concepts for users, access to real time information is gaining more and more importance. Google and a variety of tech start-ups are working on the next generation search engine to provide real time coverage of the Internet and Web 2.0 world. Google founder Larry Page has been thinking for a long time about real time indexing of the Internet. This month two real time search engines went live - OneRiot (http://www.oneriot.com) and Tweetmeme (http://tweetmeme.com/) - bringing up new competitive elements that Microsoft's Bing will not provide. Other hot topics in the search market are still semantic search (i.e. extracting and making use of the meaning of search terms) and 'answering machines' such as Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com) which access all available systematic knowledge to answer facts-based questions immediately. Microsoft is far from providing these kind of solutions with Bing. It seems as if Bing is a mere make-over of Microsoft's current search engine Live Search to catch up with the market standard. But without new and innovative features, Microsoft will not be able to break Google's dominance in the near future. Next week we will know more.

« Blog