Text 6. Microsoft Launches Bing Decision Engine

Microsoft launched its new search engine, called Bing, on June the first. This is two days earlier than planned. The software giant said Bing will totally change the way we search online. They say Bing isn’t actually a search engine, like Google, but it is a decision engine. Microsoft says the difference is that Bing will help people make decisions because Bing organizes information better than Google. A company spokesperson said there is “search overload” with current search engines like Google. This means we get too much information and cannot find what we are looking for. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Bing will help people "find information quickly and use the information they've found to accomplish tasks."

So far, there are mixed reviews about Bing. Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak says he is a “big fan”. David Coursey of PC World magazine wasn’t so enthusiastic. He said: “To be the winning search engine, you need to either do all things really well, which Bing does not, or do one or two things really well….I don’t think Bing does that either.” Microsoft hopes its $100 million, four-month advertising campaign will turn us all into Bing users and that we will all be “binging”. Perhaps Microsoft’s ultimate goal is for ‘bing’ to become a verb in English, just like ‘google’ has become. Microsoft desperately wants to catch up with Google in the search engine war. Microsoft’s Live Search only has eight per cent of the US market, compared with Google’s 65 per cent.