Bing: The Tricks and Gimmicks Engine
If you're of fleet feet, you might still be able to tune into live coverage of Microsoft's newest advertising campaign to promote Bing, their newly rebranded search engine. Right now on Hulu, Microsoft is hosting a "Bingathon."
Shot on a set that resembles a Jerry Lewis telethon, the Bingathon is hosted by G4’s Olivia Munn and Saturday Night Live’s Jason Sudeikis.
I only caught a few mins of the spectacle (recorded and preserved for your viewing enjoyment on our agency Vimeo channel and embedded below) but I saw enough to reconfirm what I've already thought (and wrote) about Bing.
Bing is not only the "Decision Engine" that we don't need, its the Tricks and Gimmicks engine that Microsoft hopes you'll use instead of Google's.
It was only about a year ago that Microsoft was offering corporations money if they only allowed their employees to use MSN Live Search. Talking to friends who used to work there I know they also would penalize employees who used anything other than MSN search (they had some sort of dollar drawer for each time you got caught with Google).
So here we are with Bing, a search engine that borrows its design from Ask, and its results scheme from Mahalo. The only thing that Microsoft hasn't borrowed (or paid for) is the common sense to steal Google's approach to search. Keep it simple!
Microsoft (and Bing) is banking on this feature of their site that does predictive airfares. My wife and I tried, and no matter where we picked as a destination, Bing told us that we should wait to buy tickets. It didn't say how long to wait, it just said wait. It provided a nice looking graph to show recent airfares, but only for dates in the past.
Is Microsoft throwing away 100 million dollars on promoting a search engine that doesn't really improve on market leader Google? Wouldn't that money be better spent improving relevance? How about getting ahead of the curve on mobile search, or video search? If Microsoft can't make an easier search engine to use, or a more relevant one, how about focusing on another aspect of search entirely?
About the Author: William Smith
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1 comment so far
rob peters says:
I think the $100 Million was on the name. "if we can only create a new verb.." Not that google isn't the best at what they do but I think the fact that the word "google" became synonomous with internet search, even if you don't use google, made them stand out like they did. I do really believe MS spent $100 Million on an epic fail.