Bing Launches. Sort Of.

Today's the big day for Bing, the new search engine that Microsoft (MSFT) rolled out today at the All Things Digital conference. Except it isn't. Microsoft issued a press release announcing the new site, and CEO Steve Ballmer walked through the site at the conference. But oddly, the site that Ballmer and the rest of Microsoft has hyped so much this week is still dead. Type in http://www.Bing.com, and all you'll get is white space. Type in www.bing.com on Internet Explorer, and Google's (GOOG) search toolbar will redirect you to Google search results about Bing. For a project designed to challenge Google's supremacy in search, complete with a $100 million ad campaign, this is a fairly clumsy beginning.

But enough about the presentation: How does Bing play with the critics who have seen it? Microsoft's premise is that people don't usually get exactly what they're looking for with the first search query and must search several times to finally find what they want. Bing aims to simplify that process by better understanding what you're looking for, scouring the Web more deeply than other search engines, and breaking down search results into categories such as Web, health, images, and so on. Bing also focuses on four search subsets—shopping, health, travel, and local—offering new interactive features to bring more relevant information quickly to your fingertips. With travel searches, for example, Bing scans the Web for the cheapest plane fares and even offers advice on whether you should buy a ticket immediately or wait for the price to drop. With shopping, Bing compiles and presents not just consumer reviews of products but the features that buyers love or hate the most about a given product. The page will be considerably more active than Google's white space; whether consumers will love the new features or just be confused remains to be seen.

So what's the word from the peanut gallery so far?

Wired's Ryan Singel loves some of the new features but complains that you have to drill down through confusing text and links to find them. "Bing does much more than search for relevant links. It retrieves and processes data, and renders it smartly," he writes. "That makes finding a great restaurant or an airline ticket, a snap. But the service is far from perfect. Beautiful data mash-ups coexist side-by-side with perplexing interface choices that make it hard to find the best features. Meanwhile, actual search results were inaccurate in some cases, and disappointing overall in the local search category, one of the areas Microsoft hopes to make its biggest splash." Bottom line: "It doesn’t quite go far enough to make us feel that it’s time to dump Google."

Ars Technica's Emil Protalinski is similarly ambivalent: "Bing is a very good product, especially in the areas where Live Search differentiated itself. While bringing some new flavor to search, it's not compelling enough to get me to leave Google behind. I will probably use it exactly like I use Live Search, as my fallback option when Google doesn't turn up what I want."

Search Engine Land's Greg Sterling has done a side-by-side comparison of Bing and Google and concludes that Microsoft has made considerable progress in building a serious competitor to Google. "My overall assessment is very positive," he writes. "Kumo, now Bing, has performed well and I’ve been satisfied with the results. There haven’t been any significant deficiencies or missing links (so to speak). While there have been a few occasions where I’ve found Google results to be better, the substantial gap that existed between Google and Live Search is largely gone with Bing."