Microsoft goes Bing over search

You may be interested to know that Microsoft's Bing search engine went live over the weekend, two days ahead of the scheduled June 3 release. This kicked off the company's newest attempt to wrestle some of the lucrative search market away from Google--which controls about 64 percent of the U.S. market.

At a sneak preview last week over at the All Things Digital conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, "Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the web and find information, but they don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find." And this is where Bing comes in, I suppose.

Bing attempts to focus on a more "functional experience." Queries keyed into Bing yield related information such as sites where users can make purchases or find information on related activities; though I won't be able to comment much on how well it succeeds without using it more.

For now, the obvious area in which Bing trails appears to be the timeliness. Searches on Bing show up only 20 minutes after a blog or article was posted; on the other hand, Google produced stories within just 5 to 10 minutes. Still, such a difference might well be for academic interest only, for most users. If you asked me, the search page looks suspiciously like that of Google's. Whatever the case, you will probably want to check out Bing here.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at PC Magazine

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