Microsoft announced that while its new search engine Bing will be rolling out gradually over the next several days it will be available to all on June 3rd – Wednesday. We covered the announcement here, but a few other things regarding Bing are worth noting as well.
Bing vs Bing
I wrote about this here as well, but Fortune Magazine extended an offer to Microsoft for his services (which may equate to no value). He claims to have had the Bing brand established since ’83.
Bing is the penname of a “business humorist” who saw an opportunity for some publicity and to have a little fun at the same time. Microsoft is playing along. The company shared the following letter to Bing on the Live Search Blog:
Dear Bing (the Author),
We couldn’t help sit up and take notice of your offer of services from one Bing to another. We were moderately surprised and mildly excited. As you might have guessed, today is quite a big day for us. Even so, we dropped everything when we saw your press release this morning. After an emergency meeting (three people were invited, all declined), we’ve decided to take you up on your offer. We’re not certain what exactly this would involve. We’re not certain it would pay much (nothing, actually) but we look forward to starting a dialogue and hope we can work together soon. Let’s do lunch. In the meantime we are sending you a case of moderately priced cigars.
Your pals,
Bing.com
Bing’s Fortune of Disease
MG Siegler at Tech Crunch is sharing a screenshot of a fortune from a fortune cookie that translates the word “disease” to “bing” in Chinese.
Apple Co-founder Digs Bing
Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak (also of Dancing with the Stars fame) is reportedly a “big fan” of Bing so far. “That was the most astounding software demo I’ve every seen,” he is quoted as saying (“big fan” was quoted as well).
According to this article at Yahoo Finance, Woz is still withholding judgment until he gets a chance to really use Bing though.
The Bing Landing Page
Bing has a placeholder landing page up now. This was nowhere to be seen at this time yesterday. There’s not much to it as the search engine awaits full launch. Right now (for me at least) it simply says, “Bing & decide,” apparently the tagline they’re going with. It does reflect the company’s description of Bing as a “Decision Engine.” Other than that, it just says “coming soon…” and links to a demo video.
Bing on Google
Bing is already being advertised on Google. A search for “bing” on Google returns a top position sponsored link for the search engine. Interestingly enough, it’s the third natural result.
Google+Search”>
A day after its announcement, Bing is still one of the top trending topics on Twitter. The Bing results in a Twitter search are rolling in incredibly fast. I wonder how long it will be before the chatter dies down a bit.
