Bing - Microsoft's new "Decision engine"

[gamefreak94]

Originally posted by ZDNet.com

Microsoft took the wraps off the new version of its search engine — and its new search brand, “Bing” — at the D7 conference on May 28.

More surprising than the actual brand choice (which I first noted was under consideration in August 2008) is the way Microsoft is trying to reposition the whole search category. Microsoft is calling Bing a “decision engine” instead of a “search engine.” Microsoft’s reasoning: Customers are ready to move “beyond search” and Bing will help them make better decisions.

Microsoft plans to begin rolling out Bing, available at Bing.com, “over the coming days.” Full worldwide deployment is slated to be completed by June 3.

Like previous versions of Live Search, Bing includes various vertical search — er, decision-making — subcategories: Shopping, travel, healthcare and local. With the Bing launch, Microsoft is adding a new category to its vertical list: Virtual Earth maps. All of these properties are getting a Bing facelift, so the current “Farecast” travel search is now known as “Bing Travel,” and Virtual Earth becomes “Bing Maps for Enterprise.”

However Microsoft describes its new engine, Microsoft has nowhere to go but up in the search market. According to comScore data, the company’s search-query share has barely buoyed above eight percent for the past year-plus. Google continues to completely dominate the category with more than 60 percent share. Yahoo, Microsoft’s former takeover target, has weighed in with 20 percent or so.

Microsoft’s previous rebrandings of its search engine (from Windows Live Search, to Live Search) didn’t help matters. Nor did the fact that the majority of potential search users had no idea that Microsoft’s search engine could be found by going to www.live.com.

Microsoft is planning to spend somewhere between $80 million and $100 million with advertising agency JWT to try to spread the word about Bing. (JWT is the same agency that last year won the bid to help try to salvage Microsoft’s “People Ready” campaign for business software.)

The company is continuing to pour multiple millions into its Online Systems Business (OSB), hoping that by throwing technology at the search problem, it will be able to out-algorithm its competitors. Last year, it acquired semantic search vendor PowerSet, and is believed to be incorporating that technology into the first iteration of Bing in an attempt to improve the quality of search results with Bing.

Microsoft is emphasizing that Bing features a number of improvements in “core search areas, including entity extraction and expansion, query intent recognition and document summarization technology as well as a new user experience model that dynamically adapts to the type of query to provide relevant and intuitive decision-making tools,” according to the company’s press release.

I’m curious: If you’re not already a Microsoft search user, what would make you switch? What would it take for you to “Bing it” instead of “Google it”?

Source: Bing: Microsoft's new search... er, decision engine | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com


Sounds all well and good, but I severely doubt it'll come even close to Google.

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[Samor]

decision engine eh? I guess I know where that's coming from....

Bing - where do you want to go today?

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[gamefreak94]

Bing: The M$ shop to buy commercial Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista Ultimate, an Xbox 360, a 1 year Xbox live subscription and MS Office 2007. Its a bargain I'm telling ya! Get it while its hot!

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[Phil]

O so they are being open about it now huh. Vista already has this feature, but its downright insidious in its operation.

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[gamefreak94]

Can't really expect anything more M$.

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[Cheesus]

The more options the better the way I see it. No point in judging it before its out.

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Originally Posted by spyhop

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[skoreanime]

I've been waiting for this actually. A friends friend (well, his brother in law actually) works for M$ and he was one of the lead developers for the Azure project. He's been telling me and my friend M$ was close to releasing a new search engine. It sounds pretty cool from what he's told us about it. But we can only wait and see

[gamefreak94]

"Bing it" <-- that sounds kinda uncool though

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[skoreanime]

I hope they kept it simple though. One of the big reasons why Google is so successful. Their main search page isn't littered with crap like other search engines were.

[gamefreak94]

Indeed. Less adverts FTW! Its one of the reasons why Yahoo! sucks so much IMO

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[gamefreak94]

I really wanted this to work. I set it as my home-page for today just so I'd use it more. Its fine for basic searches, but as soon as you specify something a bit specific or out of the ordinary, it looses sanity and returns TOTALLY irrelevant results.

Outcome? I'm back to Google as my home-page.

Oh, and another thing...



Yup, this is A1 failure right here!

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[Spyhop]

Their image search is pretty neat though. It has a few useful functions google doesn't.

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