What Is Bing?

Date First Published: 30th December 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Services

Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Easy

Difficulty Level: 3/10

CONTENTS

Features
How Does Bing Make Money?
Name

Learn more about what Bing is in this article.

Bing is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. It was launched on 3rd June 2009 and replaced Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search. It provides a standard web search and searches for images, videos, shopping, news, maps, and other categories. As of October 2018, Bing is the third largest search engine with a search volume of 4.58%, behind Google (77%) and Baidu (14.45%). Bing uses Microsoft's proprietary search algorithm to provide relevant search results.

Features

Features of Bing include:

Homepage with a background image that is updated every day.
Third-party integration, allowing users to share their searches with their Facebook friends using Facebook Connect.
Bing Translator, allowing users to translate texts or entire web pages into different languages.
Knowledge and action graph.
Bing Webmaster Tools, allowing webmasters to manage the web crawling status of their own websites.
Mobile searching, allowing users to perform searches on their mobile devices.
Bing Bar, providing a one-click access to weather, maps, videos, stock quotes, and other information.
Support for generating an RSS feed for search results.
Calculations, units, and currency conversion.
Support for filtering results by country.
Live stock quotes.
Bing news, allowing users to click through and explore possible relationships between different news stories.

How Does Bing Make Money?

Bing's main source of income is from ads. Anyone can publish PPC ads on Bing and advertisers are charged based on the number of clicks their ads receive. In 2021, Microsoft Advertising exceeded 10 billion USD in annual revenue.

Name

Bing originated from MSN search. Later, this became Live Search and in June 2009, Microsoft renamed the search engine to 'Bing'. The name change was reflective of Microsoft's new goal with the search engine, which the company branded as a 'decision engine.' The goal of Bing is to help users make important decisions more quickly and this focus is summarised in the slogan 'Bing and decide'.

The Bing name was chosen through focus groups. Microsoft decided that the name was memorable, short, and easy to spell, and that it would perform well as a URL. The word would remind people of the sound made during "the moment of discovery and decision making".

Branding consultancy Interbrand helped Microsoft in its decision for the best name for the new search engine. The name is also similar to the word bingo, which is used to mean that something searched for has been found, which is said when winning the game Bingo.