Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, arrived Thursday with some fanfare and a clear announcement that the search-wars are back on. In the one corner, weighing in at a search-usage proportional 600 lbs., the undisputed Heavy Weight Champion of the world, Google! In the other corner, weighing in at the remaining proportional weight of 400lbs, EVERYONE ELSE!
The fight seems to have be called even before it began, however, as Google will probably will sit in the corner drinking Champaign while Bing tires itself out spending $100 million on an advertising campaign.
However, like any good reporter, I decided not to write off Bing before giving it a chance, so I turned to my most trusted research tool for a non-biased opinion, Google. Most of my other reporting techniques are not as objective, as they usually include drinking heavily, writing interviews down that I hear in my head, and Wikipedia. So here are some of the results for Bing that I discovered using Google and a bottle of cheap gin:
· Bing Crosby, some old black and white singer who did something called “crooning”, which I think is what he died of in 1977.
· Bing Devine, an executive for Major League Baseball who died January 27, 2007, probably of a steroid overdose.
· Bing is also the Scottish word for a slag heap, which is some sort of mining waste – not Paris Hilton’s closet, as I thought.
· Bing was the largest toy company in the world up until 1933, when it went bankrupt. I tried to find out more about things that happened in 1933, but I couldn’t find anything.
· Chandler Muriel Bing - the dude from the popular US television sitcom Friends, which mercifully was ended in 2004.
· I tried a Google translate (Chinese to English) and came up with “will be” or “biscuit,” but Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services, says it means “very certain to answer” in Chinese, and there’s no way a Microsoft employee would ever overpromise and under deliver.
· And my personal favorite: Sir John Byng, a British admiral who was court-martialled and shot in 1757 for not doing his job very well. Things are definitely looking up for Microsoft’s newest offering.
Wolfram Alpha was even less useful (unusually so) returning a guess of “Awad Bing,” a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, one of the few remaining places on Earth where both Cannibalism and Microsoft’s search engine concepts are not simply laughed off.
[• This story, marked with a • is weekend entertainment content only and should not to be considered factual ]
