What’s the circumference of the Earth? 7926.28 miles. Bing!
That’s the sound of a Microsoft Corp. search user, possibly: The third-place search engine player has jazzed up its search name to coincide with new jazzed-up functionality. The catch-phrase-ready “Bing” is the official replacement for Microsoft's Live Search brand, taking the place of the development code name of “Kumo.”
Perhaps it was all the bad puns.
Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled the new search engine last week at the All Things Digital technology conference, and it goes live June 3.
Kumo ... er, Bing, offers a non-Googly category-based search that offers more than simply keyword-relevant results, evident from leaked screenshots back in April. Further details are likely to come next week.
The idea of more intuitive search functionality is one percolating through the industry despite Google’s clear dominance. "It's time to kill the 10 blue links," said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo's search strategy on Tuesday at an event. He was referring to the top 10 search results listed by Google et al. "We want to move away from document retrieval as center of search to divining the user's intent."
Imagine, for instance, that a search for “Prince” brought up the Purple One’s home page, discography, links to where to buy tracks and a link to Target, exclusive carrier of his new album. And all with the ability to hover and preview pages before connecting to them.
