Bing: Innovation or Theft

With the launch of Microsoft's new Search Engine, Bing, many users are asking what Microsoft is up to. The Redmond Software giant is making yet another attempt, following up on MSN search, Windows Live Search, and simply Live Search, at snatching up a part of the Search Engine niche on the Internet. Desperately trying to compete with the almost ubiquitous Google, Microsoft has released and plans to pour serious money into promoting their latest Search engine, which goes by the name of Bing.

Now looking at Microsoft's past, the company, at least it seems to me, likes to take other people's ideas and smear them into a 'new' Microsoft product. As Steve Jobs pointed out a couple years ago at one of the Mac conferences, Windows Vista, uses many of the graphical innovations seen in the Macintosh OS. Microsoft's innovation often follows another companies successes. For example, after Apple released the LISA and the Macintosh, it wasn't long before MS followed up and released a GUI of their own oddly similar to the Apple interface. Now following up on Google's success Microsoft has decided it wants a piece of that pie too, and has released a competition search engine.

However, after looking at Bing it seems to be designed in an incredibly similar way to that of the Google search engine design. Same looking list of options at the top left (Web, Images, Video, Shopping, News, etc...). Same placement of 'sponsored links'. Same color scheme for search results. Basically looking at them side by side one can see that Bing is simply Google with a colorful picture background and a new little way of categorizing results. While Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is quick to cite and emphasize this way of categorizing search results, is that really a big enough change to make Bing an innovative product?

All that considered, Bing does have at least one thing going for it as a search engine ... like Google it is based on a fast interface. If you go to Bing.com you won't have to wait for a bunch of new stories, horoscopes, and advertisements to load before you search, as is unfortunately the case at Yahoo.com and MSN.com. This speed in searching is convenient and will doubtless gain and keep many users in the future.

However, Microsoft has a long way to go in catching up with the popularity of Google and with products like Bing which look like simple Google knock-offs, they are going to have a very hard time in the search engine market. But maybe the strategy is to make Bing look and feel exactly like Google, then people won't have a problem using the two search engines interchangably, since the differences are minimal.