... and Bing(o) was his name-o

Microsoft decided to bring into the market a search engine called Bing. I'm not too bothered about the epistemology of the name, but hey - it's catchy!

Anyhoo, Googling Google reports that Bing has overtaken Yahoo (in terms of the market share) and is now "stealing share from Google".

But hey - there are reasons for this. First (and foremost), it's getting quite a bit of fanfare. No surprise.

Secondly - they've hijaced IE6's search bar! By accident or otherwise, Microsoft is saying that they're looking at it, but is it really something that was done intentionally in order to grab a lot of market share, or...? It's anyone's guess.

Now for the extra junk: if you go to bing.com, you'll see that there's a background image that changes, and if the mouse hovers over certain portions of the picture, small snippets appear. That is neat, especially for a search engine.

What's not so cool is that videos get played automatically if you hover the mouse on them. And yes, that works for porn too. I don't condone pornography, but well... a major booboo on Microsoft's part. They say that there's a small workaround to that - but it's not permanent.

Let's see if Google gets Bing Bong'd on it's door... BetaNews is doing a story on Google vs. Bing here, here, here and here. There could be more comparisons around the internet - feel free to search.

PS: I'm horrible when it comes to online formatting - if the logos are disjointed, it's because I've decided to blog regularly - for the first time :P

UPDATE: WXPNews will be carrying out a Bing and Google Comparison