Today Microsoft announced a new search engine called bing. I’ve been dogfooding this engine internally for some time now and from my experience it’s a step up from the previous engine in both functionality and appearance. It’s definitely worth playing around with for awhile.
Announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/may09/05-28NewSearchPR.mspx
While the functionality and accuracy of the results are certainly improved, this is not the biggest selling point for me. I find Live Search’s results to be very good and noticeably improving over time. I use it at home and work and rarely find a need to switch to google.com for anything. But functionality isn’t everything.
For me the biggest selling point is the new name. Having a search engine with a 2 word name consisting of existing words prevented it from beating google in a key aspect of my life: the vernacular. Google works great as a verb and hence allows itself to be injected into the conversation. For instance ‘Can you google it real quick’?
What to do with live search though’ How can I express that I’m using live search without being too wordy’ ‘Can you live search it’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it. For awhile I shortened the name to learching (Live sEARCHING). While that works, it doesn’t quite have a good ring to it.
Bing on the other hand works great
Can you bing it?
You can view the engine at www.bing.com and the team is also twittering at @bing.