This morning Microsoft announced a June 3 launch date for Bing. Their effort to differentiate against Google search is to brand Bing as a 'decision engine' that intelligently organizes results that are as good or better than those of the search engines. PC World provided a rundown of Bing's features as well as a full set of screen shots. Search Engine Land did a head to head search comparison against Google and came away with a promising impression of Bing, although Paid Content felt that Bing was neither as recent nor as comprehensive as Google.
The reaction to Bing's presentation features has been extremely positive so far. Marketing Pilgrim reviewed several features and declared them 'the best advance in search technology in the past few years'. Epicenter actually suggested that Microsoft was downplaying Bing's excellent presentation of dining, shopping and other local results.
Any silence from Microsoft will not last long. Ad Age described plans for an $80 Million+ media campaign in which Microsoft will essentially open a second front, taking on Google as well as Apple. Google, for its part, made some significant Waves of its own by announcing a new collaboration and communication platform that impressed TechCrunch to the point where they agreed that Wave is 'what email would look like if it were invented today'.
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