Ironically during the airing of Inside the Mind of Google on CNBC, Microsoft’s Bing decision engine decided to make itself unavailabe to searchers.
Bing Down
Checking around for blog coverage about the Bing outage, I found even more irony.
Search Engine Land’s coverage of the story was inadvertently accompanied by a display ad featuring Steve Ballmer’s upcoming keynote speech at Search Marketing Expo West in March.
Bing Is Down
Paradoxically, the ad for Ballmer asks “What’s in store for bing?”
While checking my email today in Gmail I was somewhat surprised to see the following ad dsiplayed above my inbox:
Microsoft Bing Google Adwords Ad
Microsoft is also buying Google Adwords to promote their new Bing “decision engine” brand in Google search results.
Google Search Bing Ad
Bing the brand is also being advertised in Google search results under “decision engine” as well as –
Decision Engine Ad
“search engine”.
Search Engine Ad
I know its hard to believe but people still search Google.com for “search engine” and “search engines”.
In fact, according to Google – over 5,000,000 people worldwide search for either the single or plural version of the phrase each month.
Search Engine Demand
However, a considerably smaller number of people search for the single or plural version of decision engine.
Decision Engine Search Demand
Roughly 5,000 times fewer searches in fact.
I noticed search referrals coming from Bing today in my WordPress logs.
At first glance, it seemed like Bing was sending an inordinate amount of referrals for a Beta product.
After further investigation, it appears Bing is now Live worldwide.
Microsoft Bing Live
With Microsoft’s official launch of Bing, MSFT also began an attempt to reposition the search process as something more than search by calling Bing a “decision engine”. Microsoft then directed all initial interest in Bing to DecisionEngine.com.
DecisionEngine.com has a video demonstration of Bing features while Live.com now redirects to Bing.com.
MSN.com is also showing a Bing preview box on its home page.
Bing Preview
Search Marketing Communications 
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