The NewsDemon Blog

Microsoft has replaced Live Search with a new brand: Bing. The new Microsoft search destination is in part an overhaul of Live Search and in part a renovation of Microsoft’s search technology. According to Microsoft, Bing lets you find Web content fast and excels at refining searches so that you can unearth the lowest airfares, discover reviews of neighborhood boutiques, or track down reliable health information.

Microsoft’s research shows only one in four searches are satisfactory on the first try. Most others force users to repeatedly refine their queries or to click around on the Web before locating what they need.

Bing’s goal is to improve the search experience, and it does that well overall in an incremental way, but especially in four key categories – shopping, travel, local, and health; by tailoring the experience in much the same way as Usenet newsgroups to specific goals associated with those categories.

Why Bing? CEO Steve Ballmer admits: “I am not what you would call the creative side of life. Short matters. Being able to verb up can be helpful.” But he also says, “We wanted something that unambiguously says search.” At least they’re not calling it Microsoft Windows Live Search Ultimate Professional Business Search Engine Edition 2009 V 1.01.060109.

We tested to see if older messages posted on the Microsoft newsgroups would appear as Google Group messages do with Goole search terms. The Microsoft Discussion Newsgroups are not indexed on Bling nor does there seem to be any integration as they are with competitor Google as part of the search results.

It’s too soon to say if the site will result in sucess or failure, but either way, it has sent a great number of conversations going on microsoft related newsgroups such as microsoft.public.msn.search.