Will Bing boom or be a big bust?
Microsoft's latest search engine could shake things up, says regular columnist Bill Thompson.
While sales of hardware may be suffering greatly it seems that the general economic gloom has not yet diminished the ambitions of the larger technology companies to give us new products and services online.
In the last few weeks we have had Wolfram Alpha offering a way to search structured data and provide results in a form suitable for further computation. We have had Google Squared promising a simple way of pulling organised data from websites into a spreadsheet style format.
Finally, a new controller-free interface for the Xbox 360 games console from Microsoft that - the company hopes - will open up gaming to the millions who are intimidated by the complexity of current controllers.
And now, after years of effort, billions of dollars worth of investment and several failed attempts, Microsoft has launched Bing, a search engine that it thinks has a chance of unseating Google and which it would like us to think of as a "decision engine".
Site seeing
The name feels a bit strange, but I suspect it will quickly become as acceptable as other odd names for network services like Spotify, Paypal or eBay.
 |   Microsoft is going to have to work very hard to penetrate the dense forest of thorns that Google has assiduously constructed over the years to protect the Sleeping Beauty of search in her fairytale castle.  Bill Thompson  |
Discussing Bing at the All Things Digital conference Microsoft's boss Steve Ballmer said the company wanted a name that was short, inoffensive and capable of being "verbed-up" like Xerox and Google, and it may have found one.
The Bing identity is already being rolled out across Microsoft's online properties. Live Search Maps are now Bing Maps, the search box at the top of the Windows Live homepage is now a "Bing box", and the comparison site ciao! is now "ciao! from bing".
Microsoft is also working hard to reach the technical community, and the Bing team are twittering away merrily, though on Facebook the most prominent results for a search for "bing" are Chandler from Friends and a cool ice-cream shop in Shanghai.
However, Google doesn't make much effort here either and the official google.com page has not been updated since last November, perhaps because Facebook is a closed community with its own internal search function.
The Bing home page is quite nice, with an uncluttered feel that clearly owes a lot to the Google approach to stripped down design containing a large inviting search box laid over an image of a rugged landscape.
It even advertises itself as a "beta", just so we know they are a serious Web 2.0 production.
It seems to do a decent job, and the general results were certainly not surprising compared to what Google delivers for the same query, while cool features such as having the thumbnails of results for video search play the linked content show what can be done with modern browsers and fast networks.
It also integrates data from other Microsoft offerings like the ciao! shopping community, maps from Multimap and prices from the airfare prediction site Farecast.
 Google still dominates when it comes to searching online |
One of the problems facing Microsoft or anyone else who wants to challenge Google is that search is now much more integrated into the general online experience than it was 10 or 20 years ago.
In the early days of the web a search engine was a website, and your choice of search engine was made every time you decided to look for something, so when Google itself launched it was easy for people like me to decide to go to google.com instead of altavista.com or yahoo.com in order to look for something.
Embed and extend
The argument that changing search engine is as easy as clicking on a new URL no longer holds, because search is embedded in many different places and often users will neither be aware of which search engine is the default nor have any real idea how to change it. Search is embedded in your browser, or accessed through a widget on a website or an app on a mobile phone.
 Search is now embedded in many different programs |
Google search is embedded in millions of websites around the internet, including the w4mp.org site for MPs staff that I manage, because it was easy, simple and free, while millions of mobile phone users are happy to default to Google search if it is provided by their handset.
This sort of integration is not limited to the web. One of the nice features of Apple's mail program, for example, is that it tries to recognise addresses in mail messages and offers a menu that lets you add a new address to your contacts list or look it up on a map. Follow the link and Google Maps opens in your browser, with no obvious way to change the default.
Microsoft is going to have to work very hard to penetrate the dense forest of thorns that Google has assiduously constructed over the years to protect the Sleeping Beauty of search in her fairytale castle.
Bing could of course succeed not by offering a better search than Google but by making money for more people. Google's targeted advertising programmes, Adwords and Adsense, are the key to the company's success and have fuelled its growth, and if Microsoft can find ways to generate advertising income for others then it may raise Bing's profile enough to take some of Google's mindshare.
As long as Microsoft has income from software sales to subsidise its search technology then it can afford to offer advertisers better deals than Google, which needs the money they provide. The success of Windows 7 and the Azure cloud computing platform could end up mattering as much to Google as it does to Microsoft.
