Happy birthday Bing!
Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, is officially one year old today. The search engine formerly known as Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search was officially unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the 28th May 2009 at the All Things Digital COnference in San Diego.
The search engine went live on June 3rd that same year and in the last twelve months are risen up the search engine rankings at a very fast pace.
According to Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft Online Audience Business Group “One year ago today, we launched Bing. It’s been a whirlwind 12 months, with the team shipping tons of new cool features aimed at making it easy and fast to make key decisions and just get stuff done. We wanted to take a short break to say thanks. Thanks to all our customers who have used the service, sent feedback, become partners, told us where we can do better, read our blog, retweeted our tweets, and just generally supported us in this 1st year of our journey.â€
Many people have switched to Bing because of the bright "photo of the day", a feature that Google have also today announced they will begin to allow, in a way, with their search engine.
The giant of search has said in a surprise move that it will allow users to customise the Google.com homepage with photos from their own PC or from their Picassa library.
For Bing enthusiasts it's no substitute for the real thing and the search engine's photos have been sources of entertainment and education for all. So happy birthday Bing, have a search on us :)
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More and more there seems to be this push to “personalize” the online experience.
Firefox has “personas”. Google has “Themes. Custom photos for Bing. Custom photos
for Google.
Maybe we’ll be so mesmerized, fascinated, and bowled over by the fact that we can
customize the experience and so busy sharing our certainly awesome talents at doing
so with our friends, relatives, neighbors, and complete strangers that we’ll overlook the
possibility that the product we’ve just customized is slowly but surely turning us into their
marketing tools and not necessarily offering the best possible product however nice
the packaging. But why bother with little details like that when you can customize and personalize to your heart’s content and certainly not criticize or objectively evaluate the value of
said product (which is in part the point)? Who cares if you’re getting the service or quality
you deserve? Customize!!! What’s more important? Functionality? Or your favorite colors?
celebrities? Music? Videos?
Frontline said it best, saw it coming in “Merchants of Cool”.
Just when you think you’re unique, original, trendsetting, you find out you’re a commodity.
Is that the Burrard Street Bridge in Vancouver?