Bing overcome by Wave
We do not often get a good laugh as techies but the best one that I have had for a while was on Thursday/Friday of last week. Microsoft announced it’s new search engine, Bing. Steve Ballmer told the audience that it would be a decision engine giving answers to questions. It was different.
A few minutes later at the Google I/O gathering Google Wave was announced that could revolutionise the way we communicate. An open source application that combines email, instant messenger and twitter all together. The place went wild. See Tech Crunch for the best piece of reporting I have read combining fact, fiction – Lord of the Rings and a whole lot of hyped developers. I would love to have seen the the look on poor Steve’s face, when he heard the news. I actually felt sorry for Microsoft as they have been soundly outmanoeuvred again.
Bing went live today 1 June four days earlier than speculated, was it to do with what happened last week who knows? I had a play with Bing this afternoon and the first thing that struck me was how like Google the lay out was. OK it had a picture as the background but that actually made me hesitate – OK to look at the pretty picture. I did a few searches where I had not quite got what I wanted from Google and it came up with some pretty good items. Search engine of choice for me will always be Google but the new kid might now be my secondary search engine instead of Yahoo. Only time will tell on how well Bing performs. We do need other search engines to come to market to help keep everything competitive.
The name of the new search engine is daft though Microsoft – Kumo would have been better, if you ask me?
Please see further information under my search categories and this article from the Guardian – Discovering more about Microsoft’s Bing search engine
