06.02.09
The Bing is dead. Long live the Bing.
Bing doesn’t sing.
That’s because Bing is dead. Bing Crosby, that is—as the fans of “White Christmas” and of the hilarious “Road” movies with Bob Hope will recall.
Bing also doesn’t sing as the new name of Microsoft’s search engine, once sporting the now-non-live “Live Search” name. Writes The New York Times:
Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” moment when a search leads to an answer.
The name is meant to conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people with complex tasks like shopping for a camera, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group.
And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.”
“The sound of found”? Well, then, aha . . . haha. Ha ha.
OK, it’s meta-Bing time. A search for “Bing” on Bing. The number-one result under “News about Bing” as I write this? “Bing’s communications director resigns.” OK, maybe the search engine’s name is kinda silly, but resigning because of it seems a little severe. Oh, wait. That Bing is Dave Bing, Mayor of Detroit. Totally different story.
The number-one regular result points to bing.com. Didn’t realize the mayor had his own site. Oh, wait. That’s the search engine this time. In the top 9 non-news-specific results (the first screenful that I see), Bing the search engine gets four results, Bing the Crosby gets two, Bing the energy drink (never heard of it, myself) gets two, Bada Bing the fictional bar on The Sopranos gets one. (At least the latter is a better/bettah/bada use of Bing.)
Finally, I can’t write a topper to this story any better than the Times did: “Meanwhile, some tech people were already noting that Bing is also an unfortunate acronym: ‘But It’s Not Google.’”
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JohnnyB said,
June 5, 2009 at 12:23 pm
I thought of Chandler Bing (”Friends”). “the sound of found”? Could that BE any more lame?
SoupAddict Karen said,
June 11, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Yup, Chandler is what first came to my mind … I guess the search engine is aimed at the youngin’s, who were not part of the “Friends” generation. (Not to be confused with the Facebook generation, where “Friends” are people you don’t actually know – you’re just pawn in their impressive head count.)
I did identical searches on Google and Bing. The top 10 results on googlelyoogleyoogleyo were entirely relevant. None of Bing’s top 20 were relevant, or even secondarily related. [!Bing!] And suddenly, I got an idea that I’ll be using da Googles for the foreseeable future….