zaiblog | Thoughts on Bing

Thoughts on Bing

Bing.com, yet another search engine from Microsoft.

Well, this isn’t totally new, some look at it as a restyled Live Search… which was previously called Windows Live Search… that began as MSN Search.

Anyway, “bing” is an onomatopoeia, similar to twang, kapow, pffffttt and boom. But from the looks of it, Bing.com is pretty much Asian-inspired like Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini’s Ning.com.

The word “bing” can be traced back to the Chinese term “bi ying” which means “very certain to answer or respond”. According to Microsoft employees, Bing.com’s codename was “kumo”, which means “spider” and “cloud” in Japanese. In the Law of Microsoft, this can refer to search engine spiders, web crawlers, bots and cloud computing.

To make things cooler, the site should play a “bing!” sound whenever you submit a search query. This reminds me of that stupid Wooo! Button iPhone app.

Though seriously, due to the failed Yahoo! bid, this is clearly their nth attempt at the search engine market. I just hope that Bing.com would stay for a while. Why? Because they’ve had a generally hazy ride; changing names, images, features, etc.

http://www.bing.com/ – Bing & decide.

Bada bing, bada boom.