| 28 May 2009 | |||
| Bing - New Search Brand From Microsoft |
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Today Microsoft is announcing Bing, a new search service, launching in beta in Europe as part of a series of global product enhancements. The new search service, located at www.Bing.com, will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide by Wednesday 3rd June. Microsoft has designed Bing to help people quickly find the information they need on daily routine searches and in order to accomplish tasks, including making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business. In all European markets, Bing will have a rich homepage image, new user experience and new search engine results page along with an improved index to offer consumers more relevant results. The Bing homepage will feature a new daily homepage image, information hotspots embedded in that image, and a new design feature displaying clear links to search certain categories such as shopping, travel, news, maps, video and images. The explosive growth of online content has continued unabated, and Bing was developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the information overload that has come to characterise many of today’s search experiences. Data from comScore Inc. shows that across all search engines, as many as 30% of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result. The data also showed that approximately two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement, re-query or click back to the search results page. John Mangelaars, VP, Consumer and Online, Microsoft EMEA, said:“Many people believe search today is a great tool; however we believe search is still in its infancy and there is much more that people can and should expect from their search service. Bing has been built on consumer insights and is designed to help people find the shortest distance from their initial search query to the point of making an informed decision. We’re excited to be sharing the beta version of Bing with Europe today.”
Overcoming ‘Search Overload’Research indicates that 66% of consumers are using search to help them make complex decisions. Consumers are now spending half of their total time searching in sessions that last over 30 minutes, as they refine their queries to pin-point what they seek. Based on customer data, only 1 in 4 individual queries are successful. Search was not originally built to assist in this type of decision making, and today there are too many links which are not sufficiently well organised. Bing was designed to help people quickly find the information they need in order to accomplish tasks and make smarter decisions. As such the US version of Bing, going live in the coming days, has been designed to deliver on three main goals:
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