Microsoft yesterday launched Bing, their new search engine. The initial response has been neutral at best, with some critics ridiculing the effort on their blog as “Bing Goes Live …or is it Live Goes Bing?” (Microsoft’s previous search engine was called Live) and “BING - But It’s Not Google”.

I did a testdrive myself and found the search results to be not very good. For example, try searching for “seo” in Singapore and you’d find that the results are very different from Google. You’ll also quickly notice that the search results page looks very familiar.

Probably the only thing that I liked about Bing was the snippet of information that pops-out when you hover over the link. Granted that it’s still in beta, but at this point, the search engine is definitely not a threat to Google. Maybe the purpose is to steal market share from Yahoo and then convince the latter to sell their business to Microsoft at a lower price - that’s more likely!

What’s certain is that Microsoft will have an uphill task driving Google faithfuls to Bing because Google has somewhat become an icon …a superstar of search engines, where even the word “google” has been taken to mean “look it up on the search engine”.

Microsoft is highly aware of this and have a $100 million marketing budget lined-up for Bing, but knowing them, they’ll probably end up like an 80 year old man trying to do the rap (remember the MDA vid?). :P