Live Search is dead … Long live Bing

Over this weekend Microsoft is replacing Live Search with it’s new search service named Bing.  Microsoft is promising a number of improvements of their previous search engine, Live Search, and even over Google.  I have read through both Microsoft’s Bing announcement and ZDNet’s technical summary of Bing.

Both articles seem to indicate that much of a website’s search results position will be determined by Bing adapting to the user’s search queries.  Meaning the through and nuanced content in a search engine friendly structure (like WordPress) will remain important.  Particularly as Bing also promises improved extraction/indexing and matching. and there are some nice interface features planned.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing we know about Bing so far, is the amazing advertising budget … $80 – $100 MILLION!  It is said that most recent nationwide consumer roll-out advertising budgets have ranged between 10 -30 mill.  Microsoft is putting some major money behind Bing. Part of the positioning is to label Bing as a “decision engine” rather than a “search engine”.  Good luck.

In the coming weeks it will be interesting to review our website referral logs and see how many more referrals will come from Bing as compared to Live.

Also notable by omission … no mention of any improved opportunities for Flash based websites in Microsoft’s announcements.

Bada bing, Bing Crosby, bing cherries?  No idea what the Bing logo and webpage presentation will look like, although TechCrunch appears to have found the Bing favicon a few days ago.  It seems rather dull, for a word like BING!

Bing is supposed to go live on June3 at Bing.com