Why don’t you just Bing me?
Yesterday at the All Things D conference Microsoft Chief Exec Steve Ballmer unveiled BING, their new search engine, and a competitor (in theory at least) to Google.
Competitor to Google is no easy task, and if you’re gonna take a crack at it, you better have something that takes the whole notion of search to an entirely new level.
I haven’t seen Bing yet – the website only has a promotional video – but a piece in Beet.TV yesterday indicates that one of the most interesting aspects of Bing is its video search capacity.
As Beet says,
Watching the demo in the ballroom of the Four Seasons this morning, I was blown away by how video search results are displayed.
They appear on a page as thumbnail images, but somehow, as they are scrolled over, the thumbnail plays as a video, it come alive, right there on the results page. This was so extraordinary that many in the room erupted in applause and cheering.
Like I said, I haven’t seen it yet, but it sounds pretty impressive.
What is more interesting (at least from our perspective), is the power and presence that video and video search are starting to take.
Whether Bing works or not is yet to be seen. But the fact that Microsoft put their considerable resources and firepower behind an engine driven, in some part, by video search tells us the speed with which video is coming to dominate the web.
As more and more video pours into the web, the need to find specific video references will become paramount.
From eBay to Wiki to NYTimes, video is going to become an increasingly important source of information.
From our perspective, the issue has always been, ‘who is going to make all this video’.
Video online is going to be a massive growth area. The demand for video is going to vastly outstrip the ability of the current production machine to feed it at an appropriate price point.
As for Bing…. well, we’ll see how it performs.
Meanwhile, it does seem an odd name.
BING.
But It’s Not Google.
hmmm
