Microsoft may be renaming Live Search "Bing"

26 May 2009 9:59 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Microsoft's relaunch of Live Search, as Pocket-lint reported on 21 May, looks to be the company's first really big attempt to unseat Google in its home territory for some time, as well as combat upstarts like Wolfram Alpha.

Some more details have emerged about the launch of 'Kumo', planned to coincide with the D: All Things Digital conference in San Diego. Firstly, Microsoft isn't sticking with the name that sounds like a cuddly Panda. Instead, Live Search might be sharing a moniker with Matthew Perry's character in Friends - "Bing".

On top of that, Microsoft's pouring money into a massive ad campign, aiming to spend $80 million to $100 million on various forms of advertising. The company is presumably hoping to repeat its successes against Apple. Google's ad budget for a year, claims Microsoft, is just $25 million.

Microsoft hopes to succeed in the search market by getting user queries right on the first go. The company is aiming to interpret what a user wants by offering "related categories" to narrow down a search. Whether that will be enough to remove "to Google" as a verb from the public conciousness remains to be seen.

Full tags

Software, Search engines, Biz, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Bing