D7: Steve Ballmer Announces New Microsoft Search Engine “Bing”

There has been ongoing rumors last week regarding the Microsoft revamped search engine launch, internally code named Kumo. Today at D7, Steve Ballmer revealed its official name: Bing, joking that they should have named it “Boom”… Well, we still have to see if the performance measure up to such “enthusiastic” branding. Additionally a bunch of new Microsoft services are getting “Binged”: Bing Travel, Bing Cashback and Bing Maps for Enterprise. According to Comscore’s market research in February 2009, Google leads the search market with 63.3 % of the search conducted, followed by Yahoo! 20.6%, Microsoft 8.2%, Ask$.1% and AOL 3.9%. Gaining market share will be hard for Microsoft, so the new search engine strategy will focus on three key elements, according to the press release featuring Microsoft’s studies:

- Great Search Results (sounds obvious): only one in four search queries delivers a satisfactory result. To offer more relevant results, Bing features Best Match, a search process that surfaces the best answer, Deep Links that allows better insight into a site’s resources, Quick Preview, a hover over window that opens over a search results caption, and Instant Answers, that provides information within the body of the search results in one click.

- Organized Search Experience: people are increasingly engaging in more complex, multi-query and multi-session searches. Microsoft developed un number of tools that helps people organized their search session and cut through the search results overload: Explore Pane, Web Groups, Related Searches and Quick Tabs. read the full description in the press release.

- Simplify tasks and help people in the top search markets such as shopping, travel, local business, and health. Bing Decision Engine is optimized for these customer scenarios. Features like Sentiment Extraction (find reviews), the Rate Key (multiple variables comparison tool) or the Price Predictor helps customers make purchase decisions. For more information, check out the Bing’s “Making off” site.

I typed “Best Search Engine” in Microsoft Live Search and the first result is Dogpile… sure, people deserves higher relevance… no worries, this will be magically “Binged” soon.