Microsoft’s ultimate victory will only come if people ever start saying they’ll “Bing” a topic to learn more about it.

Microsoft today announced the launch of its new search engine, Bing.  Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, will be making the official announcement this morning at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, CA.  Bing has been the topic of many rumors and speculations in the months leading to its unveiling—mostly people wondering whether it can provide competition for Google, now the colloquial verb for searching online.

According to Microsoft, Bing can do more and outperform current search engines.  While its performance is still untested, the press release lists many features familiar to Google users, including a homepage, maps (using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth ), and news feeds.  It also plans on integrating shopping, travel, and health information into the site.

The images of Bing provided by Microsoft so far look like an attempt to integrate Microsoft’s operating system, Windows, with the Internet.  A sensible plan, especially with Windows 7, the next OS, being another topic of conversation at the conference. Bing officially opens today, but the site won’t be complete until June 3.

Whether or not Bing can kill or even compete meaningfully with Google remains to be seen.  Microsoft’s ultimate victory will only come if people ever start saying they’ll “Bing” a topic to learn more about it.

Bing, Google search killer?

Bing is causing a buzz as software giant Microsoft takes on the Google Goliath with a new decision search engine that promises to make online searches faster and more intuitive.

The announcement Thursday came not long after Google unveiled its own new e-mail and collaboration initiative “Google Wave” which takes a new approach to online communications.

Bing, currently in preview mode, will launch to the public in Canada and the U.S. on June 3, and will roll out in other countries around the globe during the next 12 to 18 months.

“We have focused on listening to consumers and going through and really trying to understand what consumers are doing online,” said Stacey Jarvis, search lead for Microsoft Canada. “Over the past 12 years, search hasn’t evolved to meet consumer needs.”

Jarvis said as the Internet has expanded and there are increased multi-media offerings with everything from images to audio and video, consumers are finding their searches are becoming less successful.

“Consumers aren’t necessarily satisfied with their search results,” she said. “Only one in four queries currently delivers a successful result” — defined as finding what you want on the first page of the search results.

Jarvis said search queries are becoming more decision-oriented as consumers go online for everything from buying choices to health research. Jarvis said 42 per cent of all searches require some refinement.

Jarvis said that Bing is designed to anticipate user intent, a feature that allows surfers to zoom in more efficiently on the information they are seeking. Canadians are among the search gurus of the world — coming second only to Finland with an average of 124 searches per month per user.

Bing has a number of tools from autosuggest, which suggests similar or related terms to the one you are searching, best match to cut the number of click-throughs to find the subsection of a website you need — such as customer service numbers — and document preview that lets a user hover over a search result to preview the site’s content.

Microsoft Bing vs. Google

Hoping to make inroads against Google, Microsoft made its new search engine, Bing, publicly available today.

The new design, along with a new name, is intended to make its technology more user friendly in the face of stiff competition and limited market share.

Please give Bing a try and share what you think. The service was supposed to premiere June 3, but was introduced early as a preview.

Among the differentiators from Google is:

– Searches for videos return clips that can be watched by simply moving your mouse over the results.

– Travel related searches like “San Francisco to Miami flights” returns a ticket price at the top of the results.

– People can get cash back when they buy products from certain merchants that have a Bing symbol displayed next to their links.

– A list of related searches in the upper left hand side of the results page (Google places them at the bottom).

Get a tour of Bing here.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, has cautioned that the search landscape isn’t going to change immediately, but rather evolve over several years. So don’t count on hearing people using Bing as a verb, as in “Bing it,” like you do with Google.

Renaming its search engine Bing is intended to help Microsoft with its branding, which even its executives admit, was lacking. Live Search, as its search engine was previously called never caught on and got lost in a mix of other Microsoft Live products.

Google, in Mountain View, dominates the search industry with 64.2 percent in April, followed by Yahoo at 20.4 percent and then Microsoft, in a distant third, at 8.2 percent, according to comScore.

Search engines like Ask.com have tried radical redesigns to garner more market share, but they have largely failed. Ask.com, for instance, rolled back many of its changes.