Bing to take on Google?

It has been unofficially announced that Microsoft and Yahoo are joining forces in online search and advertising to try and compete with Google. The AllThingsDigital blog and Advertising Age broke this story on Tuesday and there is expected to be an official announcement within 24 hours. It looks like Microsoft's new search engine Bing be powering the Yahoo search engine.

I have used Bing a couple of times since it was released and kind of like it. It's intuitive in the way it offers you related topics to what you search for. I think that Bing has a chance to be successful.................until Google Wave comes along, and then you can forget about anyone using anything besides Google.

Bing's slogan is "Bing and Decide", which implies that Bing will offer tools to help you make decisions while searching online. I agree with Microsoft that thie best part about Bing is the travel and local information it provides, the problem is that this information is not located on the homepage and people might be gone to Google before they even find it. The search engine is not star of Bing, so why even try and take on Google search? Microsoft should be pushing Bing as a decision engine, not a search engine.

Take a look at these screen shots of the Bing homepage and then what I call the "decision page".

Bing's current homepage


Bing "descision page"


Let's face it, the current Bing homepage is Google with a Hi-Res image in the background instead of a whimsicle cartoon. But the Bing "decision page" is it's own unique portal to information about Travel, Shopping, Health and Local information. This has everyything from "How many calories do you burn reading this" to traffic updates on your freeways. The best part is you can still search the web from the "decision page". Bing needs to scrap the homepage and market the product as a Descision Engine..........really they should take on that phrase and not even mess with trying to out search enginge Google.

I hope I'm wrong about Bing because competition is good, but once Google Wave comes along there won't be any reason to go anywhere besides Google when you want to do an online search or communicate with others. Social sites like Twitter will still be fine but trying to present yourself as a rival search engine to Google is going to be hard. Really though I am pulling for sites like Bing to at least present a reason to go somewhere besides Google, untill then we will all still be Googling for a long time.