Microsoft Bing Search Will You Use It?

It's official! Microsoft unveiled its new search engine, Bing, at the All Things Digital conference in California this morning. The new search engine, to be launched in the coming days, is a hope from Microsoft to bring back users to its search engine at a time when Microsoft's CEO said the Live Search was a failure.

Bing, is as we predicted earlier this year a replacement for the miserable Live Search and the official launch name the codename Kumo search that we revealed a few weeks ago. The new Bing search which will be located at Bing.com, will begin to roll out in the next few days and will be fully deployed by June 3rd.

The new Microsoft search engine will enable people to more easily navigate, find information, and customize their searches. Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer said that he understood that Bing wouldn't be enough to tip the search market into Microsoft's favor but said it was a good starting point.



Microsoft Live was a bit of a failure from the get go because it lacked advertising dollars. Microsoft plans to launch a massive advertising campaign for Bing and will spend nearly $100 million in print, online, and on television to get the word out on the new search engine.

"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," said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. "When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they've found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions."

Advertising money a side - it all boils down to the search engine's results. If I don't like the results I'm getting from a search engine, I simply won't use it. Look at Google. They spend hardly anything on advertising, and when they do - it certainly isn't there Search Engine product. Why? Because they don't have to. People use it and it works. Period.

If Microsoft can provide a search engine that works and one that works better that Google, I'll use it.

Below are some of the benefits Bing has over Live Search which I found in the press release:

• Great search results. Relevant search results are still a top priority for people, yet Microsoft studies show that only one in four search queries deliver a satisfactory result. Bing helps identify relevant search results through features such as Best Match, where the best answer is surfaced and called out; Deep Links, allowing more insight into what resources a particular site has to offer; and Quick Preview, a hover-over window that expands over a search result caption to provide a better sense of the related sites relevancy. Bing also includes one-click access to information through Instant Answers, designed to provide the sought-after information within the body of the search results page, minimizing the need for additional clicks.
• Organized search experience. More and more customers are regularly spending time with search engines, engaging in complex, multi-query and multi-session searches. Respondents also said an organized search experience would be twice as useful in helping find information and accomplishing tasks faster. Bing includes a number of features that organize search results, including Explore Pane, a dynamically relevant set of navigation and search tools on the left side of the page; Web Groups, which groups results in intuitive ways both on the Explore Pane and in the actual results; and Related Searches and Quick Tabs, which is essentially a table of contents for different categories of search results. Collectively, these and other features in Bing help people navigate their search results, cut through the clutter of search overload and get right down to making important decisions.
• Simplify tasks and provide insight. Microsoft's research identified shopping, travel, local business and information, and health-related research as areas in which people wanted more assistance in making key decisions. The current state of Internet search isnt optimized for these tasks, but the Bing Decision Engine is optimized for these key customer scenarios. For example, while a consumer is using Bing to shop online, the Sentiment Extraction feature scours the Internet for user opinions and expert reviews to help leverage the community of customers as well as product experts in trying to make a buying decision. In Bing Travel, the Rate Key compares the location, price and amenities of multiple hotels and provides a color-coded key of the best values, and the Price Predictor actually helps consumers decide when to buy an airline ticket in order to get the lowest prices.

Want to see in detail what the new search engine looks like? Head over to Microsoft.com for a bunch of screenshots and images.

Have you already tried Bing? What do you think of it? Are you making the switch?