Microsoft revamps search engine, "Bing"

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp is revamping its search engine to counter the dominance of Google Inc in the Web search and related advertising business.

The world's largest software company, which is still in talks with Yahoo Inc over a potential partnership, has long been determined to play a major role in the lucrative Web search market after watching upstart Google take a stranglehold.

Microsoft, which has been testing the search engine internally under the name Kumo for several months, plans to introduce the new service, re-christened "Bing," over the next few days, with a full launch next Wednesday. The service will be available at www.bing.com.

Advertising Age reported earlier this week that Microsoft was planning a $80 million to $100 million ad campaign to promote Bing. Microsoft declined to comment on the report.

"We'll have what I would call a big budget -- big enough that I had to gulp when I approved the budget," said Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, who unveiled Bing at a technology conference in Carlsbad, California, run by the All Things Digital tech blog.

The Redmond, Washington-based firm has lots of ground to make up. Last month Google took 64.2 percent of U.S. Internet searches -- up half a percentage point from the month before -- handling 9.5 billion out of a total of 14.8 billion searches.

Yahoo was a distant second with 20.4 percent of searches and Microsoft third with 8.2 percent, both down slightly from the month before, according to data firm comScore.

Ballmer offered no quick turnaround in those numbers. "My timeframe is lots of years," he said at the conference. "I don't have a specific forecast, but this is lots of years."

The new name, Bing, is short, universal and can be "verbed-up," said Ballmer, a clear reference to the fact that 'to Google' has become the generic verb for searching the Internet for information.

http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSTRE54Q0GE20090528?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

Microsoft Aims at Google

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Microsoft has used attack ads to go after Apple, and now it has Google in its sights.

The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That's a big campaign -- big compared with consumer-product launches ($50 million is considered a sizable budget for a national rollout) and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft, by comparison, spent $361 million. Certainly Google has never faced an ad assault of anything like this magnitude.

JWT has been tapped for the push, which will include online, TV, print and radio. Another sign of the campaign's size: At a time when most agencies are laying people off, JWT added creatives on the Microsoft business last week.

People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won't go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they'll focus on planting the idea that today's search engines don't work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems. That, Microsoft is hoping, will give consumers a reason to consider switching search engines, which, of course, is one of Bing's biggest challenges.

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Symbian: 'Why does Google need Android?

Symbian Foundation leadership team member Tim Holbrow has questioned Google's purpose behind pursuing its own Android mobile platform, calling its strategy "weird."

In an exclusive interview with TechRadar before his speech at Wireless and Mobile 09 in London yesterday, Holbrow questioned whether Google's bullish attitude to Android could be an issue of control.

"Android's a very interesting one," he said. "A question I've asked lots of people – and not had a good answer to yet – is, I can understand the Android strategy for Google when they launched it a couple of years ago but following the creation of Symbian Foundation...and given that Google have done a lot a lot of work on Symbian, why does Google need Android now Symbian's open source?

"It seems like a bit of a weird strategy," he continued. "I mean, you could see a way forward for them contributing Dalvik (Android's virtual machine) into Symbian, it would be almost job done for them and they can start really engaging with [Symbian].

"I haven't heard a good answer to that – why does Google need Android? My concern is it's a control issue, because that's not healthy for an open source platform."

Holbrow is also surprised that iPhone and Android gets quite so much coverage as it does, even if the rise in profile of mobile apps and open source is good for Symbian, too.

"We've always seen that Symbian is this large portion of lots of devices shipping, then there's this little Apple and Google slice that gets all the attention. I'm always a bit surprised at the column inches that Android gets given the number of phones they've got and units that they've shipped. [But] if they're promoting open source [it's good for the industry].

"You've seen the benefit of the iPhone throughout the whole industry. App Store gets the whole idea of applications into people's mindsets. It's allowed us to get our message across more easily."

Getting more apps onto Symbian

Holbrow, who is on Symbian's leadership team, was at the show to talk up the benefits of Symbian's new open source status. The not-for-profit Symbian Foundation is now in full control of the platform.

So how have the beta developers received things so far? The developers aren't feeling the newness of it yet, but I think over the course of the next six months we'll start to engage quite heavily with developers bringing their applications across to Symbian," he says.

"The key thing for developers as I see it is, they can almost get past the tools, they can almost get past the support but what they really want to see is 'how can I convert [the innovation in my head] into something that's going to make me money?'

And Holbrow is complementary about Apple's model. "I guess as open source I should be talking in more religious terms but...what [developers] like about the Apple Store is that 'I can understand if I create a [popular] application I can make lots of money out of it.'"

Holbrow also believes the massive market penetration of Symbian handsets will help persuade developers that the platform should be a priority in terms of development. "It's this route to market that we really need to...sell. There is an enormous volume out there.

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