Bing Bong, Is Googles Time Up?
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, has unveiled Bing, a new online search tool that he hopes will rival Google.
He launched the public test version of bing.com at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, and the company is claiming that the service will offer a significant improvement in the number of users who actually find answers to their search queries.
Its own research suggests that up to 60 per cent of questions are not answered by the current generation of search engines, and that 50 per cent of all search are in fact repeats of previous questions.
Bing.com looks very different from Google, with a picture on its home page that will be updated daily, and the site also suggests more specific refinements to users’ queries. Once results have been displayed, a column on the left hand side suggests further related searches.
The new search engine also aims to better understand what users are looking for, and therefore displays fewer results in certain circumstances. A search for the website Facebook, for instance, would bring up just one result linking to the site itself, with the option of displaying further results about the site.
Bing.com is just one of a new generation of search engines that has been launched recently, but unlike Cuil.com or WolframAlpha.com, Bing is aimed firmly at the consumer market and has the backing of Microsoft’s vast resources.
Even so, the company has said that it is still only aiming, in the short term, to become the world’s second most popular search engine behind Google.
