Bing- Another Search Engine Attempt for Microsoft
Microsoft unveiled plans for its new mega search engine, Bing! which they prefer to call call a “decision engine” on May 28 at All Things Digital or the Wall Street Journal’s D7 conference in carlsbad, California. Deployment is expected by June 3. It appears to be very much like previous versions of Live Search with shopping, travel, health and local search categories. “Farecast” is now “Bing Travel” ” Virtual Earth” becomes a “Virtual Earth Maps” section.
Microsoft is planning to spend somewhere between $80 million and $100 million in advertising for the Bing campaign, although Steve Ballmer tended to lowball this estimate in speaking with Walt Mossberg at the conference.
One notable and questionable faction of Bing is it’s integration of content from other sites directly into it.
“How about all these people that expect to make money off their Web sites,” Mossberg asks.
“Were not trying to get in the way of copyright holders,” Ballmer said. “We’re not trying to live off other people’s work. We are just trying to make a good product.”
Ballmer notes some of different ways content gets there. Some is licensed he said, other is what can be crawled “under copyright law.”
“We license content to be in here,” Ballmer said. “That’s a way to do it.”
We shall see about that. As well as the fact that some of the features such as that of “Local” Search have already been successfully used by Earthlink’s perhaps lesser known search engine for years and to my preference I might add (as Google does not have this feature ) . Even Earthlink’s maps systems are superior to Google’s many times. Could Bing just be another way that Microsoft builds(aka copies) other’s successes and puts it in a pretty package? Also, since Microsoft has maintained around 8% of the search-query share compared to Google’s 60%, will searchers readily go to Bing as a solution.
