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So, Microsoft finally announced their new “decision engine”: Bing (going live on June 3rd). I’m eager to see if the product I helped write before being laid off will be included in the launch. In the mean time, Microsoft marketing has been super busy putting up site after site explaining why search is broken and why they think they’ve fixed it (DecisionEngine.com, Discover Bing).

I’d love to sling to dirt about the internal workings of Bing, but I was only involved in commercial search at Microsoft. Microsoft did acquire Powerset some time ago, so I’d like to believe they really have improved the search algorithms. I was using internal builds of Bing (code named Kumo) when I worked at Microsoft for the last 6 months or so, and found I still had to switch over to using Google to find the results I wanted. Is Google’s search “better” and more “relevant,” or am I just trained to expect the results Google gives me?

What I can say is that Bing has been a long, long time coming for Microsoft. The “rebranding effort” (that’s what I always heard it referred to internally) was originally going to launch last year, but was delayed over uncertainty surrounding the possible acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft. I hope Bing is successful for Microsoft: they desperately need something to show after being in the search engine business for so long. Sure, it’s mostly just a re-skinning of Live.com, but given that the average internet user has no idea that Microsoft even has a search engine maybe it’s best to pretend Bing really is a brand new thing.


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