‘Bing:’ Microsoft to Launch New Search Engine
May 28th, 2009 by Darrin Widick
On June 3, Microsoft plans to launch “Bing,” the latest iteration of its search engine. With Microsoft’s current engine, called Live Search, drawing less than 10% of the search market for most of our clients, Bing has an uphill battle on its hands to come close to Google, which enjoys 70-80% market share on our client sites.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg at D: All Things Digital in Carlsbad, Calif., Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the name Bing was chosen because it “is short, it’s easy to say, and it works globally.” But for searchers, will Bing’s technology be easy, and will it work? And will it help Microsoft come closer to the $20+ billion in revenue Google earned from its AdWords program in 2008?
We thought we’d try an experiment with Live Search this week and Bing when it debuts. The search results to the right represents a Live Search query on the term, “Children’s Hospital.” Next week, we’ll run the same query on Bing and let you know the results.
For the search, Live returned Children’s Hospital Boston as the No. 1 listing, with eight site links below the URL and an option to “Show more results for childrenshospital.org.” The No. 2 position included three listings geared to my zip code. On the right-hand side was a listing of eight “Related searches.” Interestingly, there were no “Sponsored Results,” which is how the engines make their money.
Stay tuned for the same query on Bing ….
