Microsoft’s push to make bing a player in online search
Posted by Brandon Francis on 28 May 2009 | Tagged as: Search Engine News
The wait is finally over: Microsoft’s long anticipated new search engine is to be unveiled this week by Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer. Bing is the renamed and revamped search engine to replace Microsoft’s current search engine -Live.
The project, previously named Kumo, has seen Microsoft pour a lot of its resources into it. According to advertising trade magazine, Advertising Age, Microsoft is set to spend up to $100 million to promote the site. And for a deep global economic recession or any period for that matter, that is one heck of an investment. It is an especially large figure when you look at it against the industry leader Google, which only spent around $25 million last year on advertising.
The look of the search engine is quite similar to that of Google, but it promises to be a better search engine. Better? I didn’t know there was something wrong with the old one 
The following is a quote taken from an article written by computerworlduk.com from a former Google executive, Shashi Seth, who discusses the effectiveness of current search engines-a la Google, Yahoo and Live:
“If you grab the average user off the street and ask them, ‘Does search suck?’ I think they’d say no. They don’t know what else can be done … They think search does a pretty good job, and if you could prove otherwise with a product that’s differentiated, people will sit up and take notice.”
Microsoft’s previous search engine Live was not terribly successful, despite the high expectations Microsoft had for it. Is this time going to be any different?
Below is a screen shot of Kumo, the search engine that Microsoft is speculated to have renamed Bing. (Microsoft allowed users to view demo screen shots of the search engine earlier in March):
At the beginning of this blog post I posted an alleged snapshot image of the bing logo.
Ultimately, it is up to the users as to whether they care to switch search engines, but Microsoft is hoping they will. Look out for the launch of the search engine. It wouldn’t hurt to give it a try
