On Thursday May 28 Microsoft Inc has launched a new web search engine called “Bing.” The worldwide software giant has decided to replace MSN and Live.com by new state of the art Bing.com, described by the US software colossus as a “Decision Engine,” with the aim of more understanding of what people want on Internet and to challenge king of search engines Google.

Bing is launched at a time when Google and Yahoo! have announced refinements to their search engine services and Wolfram Alpha query engine starts providing answers instead of lists of websites. While commenting on Bing Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said “Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find." He further said “When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web."

At initial stage Bing is aimed to focus on online shoppers and will primarily help people to make buying decisions, plan trips, research health matters, find local businesses etc. for example, people using Bing to shop online will be provided product reviews automatically and those planning trips will get information regarding travel bargains. Bing is featured with "Best Match" option that identifies and gives high priority to answers that seem to best fit queries.

Bing includes some advancement to Live Search's core search, such as entity extraction and expansion, query intent recognition and document summarization technology. It also presents a new user experience model, which changes based on the query to offer more relevant decision-making tools.

The Bing brand will extend across other Microsoft search products. Microsoft's mapping platform, Virtual Earth, will now be branded as Bing Maps for Enterprise. Technology from Microsoft's April 2008 acquisition of Farecast is now a central part of Bing Travel. Microsoft's popular cashback program is now dubbed Bing cashback, and will be fully integrated into the Bing Shopping experience.

Microsoft has been stuck in third place after Google and Yahoo Inc. for years. Its share of U.S. search queries was 8.2 percent in April, according to the research group comScore Inc. Google was used for 64.2 percent of queries, and Yahoo's share totaled 20.4 percent. Internet experts observed that it is too early to say that whether Bing would be able to challenge Google’ domination but they all believe that the launching of Bing will create a new healthy competition among search engine giants.