Today, is the official launch of Microsoft’s new breed of Search Engine starting with the US… and spreading out internationally, to be completed by 3rd June. (I’ve blogged about Microsoft’s plans for a new Search Engine before, originally rumored to be called Kumo… I prefer Bing as a name).
Bing will be/is a Decision Engine which has been built with the sole purpose of helping you filter through the 100s of millions of websites and results returned. By the looks of things from this clip, it’s looking really slick, user-friendly and certainly seems to offer a new set of navigation features that will allow users to filter through content and access sub-level pages directly (similar to Google Site Links, but seemingly more usable). It also looks like it’s gone a step further than Google with it’s Meta Search (vertical search) functionality.
I’m not going to join the legions of rumor and hype-mongers who are touting this as the new Google Killer. I don’t think it will be, but it’s certainly good to see a bit of competition in the Search Engine space again… in addition to Wolfram|Alpha’s ‘Computational Knowledge Engine‘.
From a business perspective, I can see from the clip that Microsoft’s PPC ads will be presented on this site (presumably from Microsoft’s AdCenter)… but not sure if there are plans for other business models. I’m also unclear on how the integrated meta-search of data (eg. hotel results) will get sourced? will their be an exclusive partner in each market for this? Will this cause some controversy on the biased-ness of the engine?
Incidentally, would you agree that the fact the engines are being marketed as ‘Knowledge Engine’ and ‘Decision Engine’ represents an acknowledgment that Google is all powerful at ‘Search’… and rather than compete directly they’re looking for differentiation?
Here’s a behind the scenes look at Bing… I look forward to playing with it over the next couple of days!
Bada Bing!
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