Microsoft to debut Bing search engine alongside $80 million ad campaign
It’s been a while since rumblings of Kumo, Microsoft’s codename for its new searching engine offering, made the rounds. From the looks of things, that’s about to change… Big time. Redmond is said to be preparing to launch Kumo — with the final name “Bing” — alongside a massive $80 million advertising push that will aim to convince people search is broken and Microsoft has fixed it. It’s a tough sell, no question. Microsoft’s latest Laptop Hunters ad run has been quite the success of course, but there is a pretty massive difference here: Laptop Hunters addresses personal computers, where Microsoft is already the undisputed heavyweight champ with a shade under 90 percent of the market. Bing is a search engine and Microsoft’s search products currently combine to hold just over 8 percent of the market. Bing needs to build a user base, not keep one. So the task where advertising is concerned is a much different one, but the market could be ready for a true contender. According to Microsoft’s research where search is concerned, 42 percent of searches require refinement and 25 percent of clicks are the back button. As dominant as Google is, there still may be plenty of room for improvement in terms of efficiency.
first. compitition is good
42 percent of searches require refinement!!!!
thats the whole point, and its not to bash google here its just building and improving upon a g r e a t product, good for them.
in this day in age you’ve got to be able to search without a billion (literally) results poping out. whats more the actual important, or relevant result is “result no. 1,230,658″ which i will find after hours of clicking “next” on the bottom.
also, the order of returns is sometimes confusing. you can get web pages dated years ago, before you get current ones. it happenes.
LET THE IMPROVEMENTS BEGIN!!
this is great. Google has slowly increased the amount of advertisements that pop up as results in the general google search. If you are in academia, something like this could be really helpful.
3rd!
this might work out for M$..finally the search engine that I was waiting for unlike G$$GLE
Eh, I dunno. Can you imagine someone saying “Gee, I wonder if I can find a picture of a kitten online?” – “Sure you can, why don’t you Bing it?”
Doesn’t quite work…
I’m with Doug; the name just murders all chance for this.
Someone should just name a search engine Fuk already and get it over with.
“the name just murders all chance for this.”
i wonder what your thoghts were 10 years ago for the name “google”?????
was even more odd
Funny thing: if you go to http://www.bing.com with IE8: it shows the ‘broken website’ icon meaning it drops back to the IE7 renderer. The browser shows a completely empty page, but it does have the website icon (a stylized ‘b’). Also a whois report shows this really does belong to MS.
I’d agree with the BING name:
http://www.bing.im/en/
They are changing their name soon (wonder why)
looks like http://www.bing.com has a bookmark icon already setup; some of the background code looks like its ‘LIVE’ based.
LAST!
This is great, google needs refinement and I’m so so sick of the millions of ads that pop up with Google. That’s why I stopped using Yahoo.com.
is the coloring of Bing in this topic just to acknowledge google? It HAS to be, right?
Let’s not forget, many of the search refinements include spelling errors. MSFT needs Yahoo Search. It’s that simple.
I feel like a tool, but when I saw this at first, the only thing I could think of was the dork from “Friends”
If you guys are getting billions of results for your searches on google, you need to learn how to search!
They should spend the money to get thier other products improved ( e.g Windows Vista and 7 ) and leave the search business to the guys who know search such as Google and or Yahoo. 80 Million make me retiring tomorrow.
Funny, netcraft shows http://www.bing.com running Linux.
Is the first “Lauren” and the bald guy going to be part of the ad campaign? They’ll add a layer of authenticity of the campaign!
i always felt like google had us trained to do searches the way they wanted us to. unfortunately, i felt like i got the search results that i wanted about 25% of the time while another 75% i was left very unhappy. still, i felt google was better than everybody else.. i tried cuil and dogpile and a whole lot of others but my experience has been fairly negative so i’m not keeping my expectations too high.
Damn 80 million bucks just to advertise a damn search engine! Ain’t Capitalism(materialism) great!
MS is renaming their search engine Bing? I wonder if they’re going to start renaming their other online stuff Joey, Ross, Monica, etc… haha I cracked myself up..
please tell me thats not the actual logo….
Does anyone else see the resemblance to the fonts and colors used on the Google logo ?
@Doug…When did “google” become a word in the English language. It’s just fun. 20 years ago, did you ever think you would say “Oh, let me “google this”. WTF is google? lol
Peace on Earth!