We Binged

Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing” is up and running, meaning Google and Yahoo now have fresh competition in the lucrative business of directing people hither and yon on the rapidly-expanding world wide web.

Oh, and people obsessed with “Googling” themselves now have another potential adverb to add to their vocabulary … i.e. “I binged myself and got nada.”

We gave Bing a trial run today and were modestly impressed. It’s certainly got a pretty enough home page (with clickable icons inside its colorful, rotating pictures), although the Bing News page has plenty of work to do if it wants to catch up with Yahoo or Google.

Sure, the news searches are easy enough to execute (duh, type in the name of the news maker you’re looking for and – bing!), but the main “news” page seems a little thin compared to Google and Yahoo.

Bing – which is reportedly backed by a $100 million promotional campaign – aims to boost Microsoft’s paltry 9% share of the search engine marketplace.

Judging by its first week, Bing is doing pretty well – already accounting for a 2% jump in traffic to Microsoft search pages.

But can it wrestle loyal searchers (including our founding editor) away from Google News?

Experts are skeptical.

“To convince someone to leave Google, your offering needs to be 100 times superior,” writes PopSci.com’s Tom Conlon. “Otherwise, why bother? Bing certainly does do a few things better than Google, but those few things aren’t quite enough.”

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