The sound of found: Bing!

This morning, Steve Ballmer is speaking at the D Conference where he’s unveiling our new search service — named Bing. Bing is rolling out internally to Microsoft employees worldwide today and will be available to you and your friends in the coming days.

Image of Bing logo

We spent lots of time listening to you, learning how you use search today and what you’re trying to accomplish with search. We found that search is no longer just a tool for mapping a keyword to a document. If you’re like many people, you’re increasingly using search to help you make decisions: from everyday decisions, like which restaurant to eat at, to complicated decisions, like which digital camera to buy or when to fly and where to stay on your next vacation.

Problem is: search engines themselves haven’t evolved all that much to address the new ways that people like you are using search today.

So today we’re introducing a new kind of search that goes beyond traditional search engines to help you make faster, more informed decisions. It will do this by combining a great search engine (with powerful new features to improve your results for any query), more organized results, and unique tools to help you make important decisions. We think of Bing as a Decision Engine.

So why did we pick Bing as the new brand name? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. It needed to be like the product — optimized for the Internet. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world. We like Bing because it sounds off in our heads when we think about that moment of discovery and decision making — when you resolve those important tasks. And frankly, the name needed to clearly communicate that this is something new, to invite you to come back, to re-introduce you to our new and improved service and encourage you to give it a try.

In the coming weeks we’ll be using the blog to update you on Bing and provide an inside look at how we’ve designed it to cut through the clutter on the Web and deliver more relevant results to help you make better choices. In the meantime, we encourage you to check out our press release, visit http://www.decisionengine.com, and follow us on Twitter (@Bing) for all the latest news.

Looking forward to sharing Bing with you very soon!

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President, Online Audience Business Group