Microsoft challenges Google with Bing search engine
Microsoft Corp. introduced a search engine with enhanced shopping, travel and sorting features, an effort to show that Google Inc. can’t do everything.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled the service, called Bing, at a technology conference Thursday in Carlsbad, Calif. The program will be available over the next several days, accompanied by the company’s first broad advertising campaign promoting a search engine.
Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, has an eighth of Google’s U.S. market share in Internet searches, forcing it to find specific niches to exploit. The company is seeking areas where Google doesn’t deliver exactly what users want, said Mike Nichols, Microsoft’s general manager for search products.
“We don’t have any illusion that people will wholesale change their behavior in a massive way,” Nichols said.
A shopping feature, for instance, lets users find product thumbnail photos and reviews. By clicking on one of the listings, users can view a table with pricing and shipping information from various sellers. A bar on the left side summarizes the main features mentioned in reviews and how well they scored.
Searching for a flight route — say, Seattle to New York’s JFK airport — will return predictions on whether fares will rise. The software will list the best deal and let customers book travel and hotels. That feature relies on software from Microsoft’s 2008 acquisition of Farecast Inc.
When customers search on a term, Bing gives them a “best match” on the top of the screen. Searching for a company like United Parcel Service Inc. would list the shipping company’s customer-service number and provide a box where users can enter a tracking number to locate their package.
Google welcomes the new competition, said spokesman Gabriel Stricker. “Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space,” he said. “It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day, our users benefit from that.”
Microsoft has lost market share since its first home-grown search engine debuted in 2004. Before that, it offered a program from Yahoo. Bing is the third brand the company has used for its search software.
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