Will ‘Bing’ be the web’s new search verb?

We’ve been Googling now for just over a decade (we were even able to lose the quotation marks when Merriam-Webster proclaimed it a word in 2006) and Google’s domination of the search world has since left Yahoo, MSN, and AOL searching for a way to catch up.

Well, now Microsoft is launching Bing. A ‘new’ take on the search engine, complete with a Vista-esque look (seen here with code-name ‘kumo’), and catchy onomatopoetic name.  The site touts itself as a decision engine, claiming to be more intuitive and present many of the answers to commonly asked questions on the results page. For example, Bing responds to a query of “weather” with a forecast based on your IP address.  Bing’s results pages are more tailored to search type, allowing ecommerce-style categorization, deep links, and occasionally create a search page particular to the website you’re trying to reach.  Bing also boasts page previews, predictive text, and even the ability to aggregate airplane ticket prices. 

The biggest problem with all of these amazing new features is that they’re not new.  Google’s engine had most of these features for at least a year, and has continued to add new features continually.  Users have already become accustomed to easily accessing the tracking of packages, weather reports, movie show times, and such.  Bing can’t just match Google’s functionality, users will have to be sold on the idea that it will easy and advantageous to change (See Pankaj Ghemawat’s paper on market incumbency and technological inertia.) After opening up its Internet Explorer 8 browser to non-Microsoft search engines, Microsoft may have lost its best chance to gain wide usage. 

As has become the stereotypical for the $60 billion (sales, 2008) company, they’re planning an ad campaign.  A big one.  With a $100 million ad budget for ad agencyJWT,  (compared with a reported $14 million in non-recruitment advertising for all of Google) and plans for print, television, and online, there’s sure to be a proper introduction coming soon.  There’s already Facebook and twitter pages set up for the hip new engine. 

Despite the dollars going into the promotion of the product, Microsoft has seldom had much success in their marketing campaigns. With all the buzz that’s sure to follow Bing’s launch, it’s difficult to forget the hype surrounding the Microsoft Surface touch-screen table.  (See SarcasticGamer’s parody of the ill-fated iTable here.) I suspect that the result of Microsoft’s newest effort won’t be a dethroning of Google, but rather a mildly improved Google search interface as a result of the increased pressure.