Bing.com

Bing.com

It will be “Bing it” the new expression?

The speculation is over. Microsoft’s search engine officially has a new name, Bing. Bing  will be available to American users on 3 June, and UK users should have access to a beta version. AdAge published this week an article in which they told us that Microsoft will invest an $80 to $100 million ad campaign. Google, by comparison, spent a total of $25 million on ads in 2008. Ads will appear on the web,  on  TV, radio,  in newspapers and magazines.

The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That’s a big campaign — big compared with consumer-product launches ($50 million is considered a sizable budget for a national rollout) and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft, by comparison, spent $361 million. Certainly Google has never faced an ad assault of anything like this magnitude.

JWT has been tapped for the push, which will include online, TV, print and radio. Another sign of the campaign’s size: At a time when most agencies are laying people off, JWT added creatives on the Microsoft business last week.

People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won’t go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they’ll focus on planting the idea that today’s search engines don’t work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems. That, Microsoft is hoping, will give consumers a reason to consider switching search engines, which, of course, is one of Bing’s biggest challenges.

Stefan Weitz, director of Bing Search, explains in the video below  how Bing actually works.

Innovations ?

Discoverbing explains why Bing will be the number one search engine.

In Bing we are introducing a new concept called Categorized Search. Clearly, not every query fits into a categorization schema, but the results of a large percentage of queries can be categorized to optimize the retrieval of information. Traditionally, many engines have optimized around being a keyword-to-URL mapping tool and designed their user experiences as such. Where they have fallen down is in not enabling a user to explore a topic or find a variety of sources and insights from the Web in an organized manner.

Categorized Search helps users organize their search in a number of ways – namely, by increasing the authority and diversity of results.

Quick Tabs offer easy access to the Web Groups relevant to your search. These tabs put the most common refinements for your query term at the top left of the Explore Pane. The Quick Tab elements map to the Web Groups throughout the results page. Clicking on any of the elements will automatically execute a query focused just on the Quick Tab refinement.

Will be the new Bing the number one search engine? Ask.com famously spent $57 million in 2007 to market its engine, and another $22 million last year, according to TNS. But Ask.com is only the third, after Google and Yahoo! Search..

More Bing pictures

Bing is a new search engine designed to do more than merely help you find information. Bing organizes search results and provides refinement tools that help you overcome information overload, get things done and quickly bring you to the point of using that information to make an informed decision.

Tagged as: Bing it, Bing.com, Microsoft Search Engine, new search engine, Search Engine Optimization, SEO