Everyone is talking about Bing today – well, everyone who isn’t too busy watching Google do the Wave. If you haven’t been paying attention, Microsoft is about to spend $100M to market an upgrade of its web search engine, rebranding it from Live to Bing (by way of Kumo).
I’m reserving judgment about it until I have a chance to play with it myself – and I assume I’ll have to wait until next week just like everyone else (unless any kind insider cares to offer me a sneak preview). But it is interesting to see how Microsoft is positioning Bing as a “decision engine” rather than a search engine, with messaging at least mildly suggestive of HCIR. At least according to their marketing, their focus is on organizing results, simplifying tasks, and supporting decision making.
I personally can’t help noticing how the messaging looks familiar–and they even name-check a very familiar customer in their marketing video. But it’s probably just a coincidence.
In any case, Google also claims to organize the world’s information – and it’s even starting to offer users limited query refinement capabilities. If Microsoft is going to make headway on this round, I suspect they’ll have to deliver a significantly better experience than Google at the task level for at least a couple of common tasks. The areas they tout in their marketing are travel, health, and shopping. It certainly wouldn’t be hard for Microsoft to beat Google on all three – note the overlap with areas where Google isn’t good enough. But it remains to be seen if they will.
