Microsoft unveils Bing

Background

On 28 May 2009, a Thursday, Microsoft unveiled a new search engine named Bing, renewing its effort to challenge Google's dominance of web search ^[2]. Search is strategically valuable because it sits between a user and the pages that user is trying to reach: whoever runs the search box shapes where attention goes, and can sell advertising against the traffic passing through it. Microsoft was at the time a minor presence in that market; comScore figures for April of that year put its share of U.S. searches at 8.2 percent ^[2]. For a challenger in search, the hard part is rarely the index itself; it is persuading people to change a habit as fixed as typing a query into a familiar box.

The announcement

Microsoft's announcement said the new service would begin rolling out over the coming days and would be fully deployed worldwide on Wednesday, 3 June 2009 ^[1]. The launch was therefore staged rather than a single switch: users would meet the new engine at different moments, with the global roll-out completed at the start of June.

What Microsoft said the product was

Microsoft described Bing as a decision engine that categorizes results to make searching more organized ^[3]. Rather than returning one undifferentiated list of links, the service was presented as sorting what it found into categories, so that a user could see the shape of the available material before clicking.

The engine would initially focus on shopping, travel, local business information and health-related research ^[2]. These are queries that usually carry a task behind them: choosing a product, planning a journey, finding a business nearby, looking into a symptom. For such tasks a ranked list of ten links does only part of the job; what helps is having the options organised, compared and summarised.

Steve Ballmer put the same gap in more general terms, saying that search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web but do not do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find ^[2]. That is an argument about the step after the click. Finding a page is only useful if the reader can then do something with what is on it — compare prices, check a route, weigh a treatment — and the claim behind Bing was that this second step had been neglected.

China and the promotion budget

China.com.cn reported on 30 May 2009 that Microsoft had announced a Chinese-language brand for Bing, Biying (必应), the first time Microsoft had created a Chinese brand for an internet service ^[3]. A dedicated local name is a small thing technically and a significant one commercially: it lets the product be talked about, typed and remembered in the language most users search in.

The same report, citing U.S. media, said Microsoft planned to spend tens of millions of U.S. dollars promoting the new search brand ^[3]. A marketing budget on that scale indicates that the company treated the launch as a branding problem as much as an engineering one.

What it meant

The distance to be closed was visible in the numbers: 8.2 percent of U.S. searches in April ^[2]. Bing's introduction therefore did two things at once. It put forward a specific idea about what a search engine is for — not only navigating to pages but supporting decisions with organised information ^[3] — and it committed the company to competing on brand and marketing as well as on relevance, with a named product, a local-language identity in China and a large promotional spend ^[3]. The 8.2 percent figure from April was the baseline against which any later change would be measured ^[2].