So what does this mean exactly? Well, if you believe roughly 75 per cent of Lifehacker’s polled readers, it means that Google search is about to get more accurate, relevant and useful. Or that we’re about to feel like Google search has gotten more accurate, relevant and useful, because we read an article about it somewhere. Win/win! [Lifehacker]

WolframAlpha folks are billing this as a half-priced graphic calculator, with that added benefit that it plugs into the existing WolframAlpha search engine, but again I keep coming back to the fact that I can point my browser at that web site and it costs me substantially less than $US50 to do so.

Said WolframAlpha rep Josh Dilworth in an email to Gizmodo today, “How many people will buy it? We’re not sure, but looking at the other apps that are $US50+, we think that we’re of at least comparable in utility and functionality, if not more. And, part of what the company is also doing is making a statement about the non-trivial nature of WolframAlpha’s capabilities, and how much the system has matured since launch.”

What better way to show maturity than peg your inaugural App Store app with one of the higher price tags in the whole system. Amiright?

There’s something disarming, humanising even, about sitting Steve Ballmer in front of a webcam, sipping a giant iced coffee from Starbucks (which explains so much), talking about how Apple can only dominate “niche” categories, like media players, not something bigger.

He says that uberlarge categories—”non-niche” ones, like PCs and phones that sell over 300 million units a year—won’t be dominated by a single player. There’ll be multiple guys in the game, and he still thinks “the software that’s gonna be most popular in those phones is gonna be software that’s sold by somebody who doesn’t make their own phone”.

Yes, this is the same Steve Ballmer who admits Microsoft boned Windows Mobile hard and is about to come out with some Microsoft-branded phones for youngsters. That’s just a small of part of an interview that covers lots of ground and is definitely worth watching — it’s a view of Ballmer you probably haven’t seen before. [TechCrunch]

Except Visual search can’t really do anything of these things yet, because it’s just a small collection of search-tied photo albums, at least for now. Oh well! Give it a try anyway, right here. (Warning: You must be Silverlit). [Microsoft]

Abu-Hadba’s statement that “Most of what Google does is defensive” isn’t actually the tech world’s most hypocritical statement (when was the last time Microsoft created something that wasn’t a version of an already-successful product?). He means that everything Google does is designed to keep their core business, search and advertising, growing and dominant. The impetus behind Chrome OS, according to him, isn’t to encourage simpler and easier computing, but weirdly enough, to distract other companies from attacking its own cash cow.

This is an interesting conversation because Microsoft has been doing just that, attacking Google’s core, with Bing—yet Abu-Habda doesn’t see Bing as a similar distraction to stop others from attacking Microsoft’s core business, Windows. So why is Microsoft allowed to venture into new-for-them waters with projects like Xbox, Zune, Silverlight, Bing and more, while Google is an inherently defensive company for announcing a ballsy new project of their own?

Microsoft might just be a bit nervous about Chrome OS, which we don’t think is really warranted at this point. Microsoft’s got an outrageously dominant OS marketshare, and seeing as how we know just about nothing about Chrome OS, it’s quite a bit soon to be launching attacks at a product that may well not be a competitor at all. [Venture Beat via Crunchgear]

Ballmer’s been talking about search now for the last couple years as something Microsoft needs to put more money and effort into. The failed Yahoo deal last year was one play that didn’t quite work out. So they’re trying Bing.

What do you think? Is search Microsoft’s biggest mistake? If you ask me (you didn’t), I’d say Microsoft’s biggest mistake is the guy answering this question. [TGDaily]

The ad: Crammed full of memes and hard on the eyes, it’s a little obnoxious! That’s sort of the point, though, and it does a good job of summing of what’s useful in Bing—its Decision Engine—for people who haven’t really been following the story.

So, Mobile Bing! It’s a typically stripped-down mobile search site, and behaves much like Google’s basic mobile site. Sadly, some of Bing’s most touted features are seemingly absent. Techcrunch notes that most curated results, like health and travel info, don’t work, except for shopping recommendations, which can be a little over-aggressive. That said, in my short testing I found local searches, like weather and films, to be pretty good—even from the UK. [Neowin, BGR]

In the automatically generated top links for Gizmodo are months-old links to single posts about the second Bill Gates/Seinfeld ad and leaked box shots of the Zune 16GB and 160GB models. Really?

Google’s top eight, on the other hand, make a bit more sense, with links to tag pages for the Palm Pre, Steve Jobs and Space—three currently (or recently) trending topics, among others. Bing’s weird results are probably just the result of some young, dumb algorithms, but they certainly don’t look great.

UPDATE: Just like that, Lifehacker’s got a list of cool stuff to try with Bing. [Bing—Thanks, Jagslive, Andy Scott, and Lorenc!]

Steve Ballmer just confirmed rumours that Microsoft’s new search engine, previously called Kumo, has been christened with the wonderfully onomatopoeic, possibly stupid name, “Bing”. UPDATE: And it’s coming next week.

From the AllThingsD interview, a peek into Ballmer’s brain:

I’m not the creative guy, here …. short mattered … people like to ‘verb up’ … works globally, doesn’t have negative connotations.

Early word is it’s got a simple, minimalist, colourful interface, and boasts some Wolfram Alpha-like features though a function called “Instant Answer.” More as we get it. (Image courtesy of Ars Technica.)

UPDATE: Bing will go public on June 3rd. Ars has a hands-on, and Microsoft has posted an info page. Their strategy, it seems, is to provide direct answers to questions, sort of like Wolfram Alpha does, but with a focus on everyday queries like consumer product info, weather, local interests and even health questions. Ars’s conclusion:

Bing is a very good product, especially in the areas where Live Search differentiated itself. While bringing some new flavour to search, it’s not compelling enough to get me to leave Google behind. I will probably use it exactly like I use Live Search, as my fallback option when Google doesn’t turn up what I want. Give Bing a spin, but don’t expect anything revolutionary, just evolutionary.

Oh. Well, we’ll all get to try it soon enough.

Press release below. [AllThingsD]

Microsoft’s New Search at Bing.com Helps People Make Better Decisions
Decision Engine goes beyond search to help customers deal with information overload.

REDMOND, Wash. – May 28, 2009 – Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Bing, a new Decision Engine and consumer brand, providing customers with a first step in moving beyond search to help make faster, more informed decisions. Bing is specifically designed to build on the benefits of today’s search engines but begins to move beyond this experience with a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.

The result of this new approach is an important beginning for a new and more powerful kind of search service, which Microsoft is calling a Decision Engine, designed to empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to important decisions. The new service, located at http://www.Bing.com, will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide on Wednesday, June 3.

The explosive growth of online content has continued unabated, and Bing was developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the information overload that has come to characterize many of today’s search experiences. Results from a custom comScore Inc. study across core search engines show that as many as 30 percent of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result. The data also showed that approximately two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement or requery on the search results page.

“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,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. “When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”

A New Approach to Internet Search

Based on the customer insight that 66 percent of people are using Internet search more frequently to make complex decisions,* Microsoft identified three design goals to guide the development of Bing: deliver great results; deliver a more organized experience; and simplify tasks and provide insight, leading to faster, more confident decisions. The new service, built to go beyond today’s search experience, includes deep innovation on core search areas including entity extraction and expansion, query intent recognition and document summarization technology as well as a new user experience model that dynamically adapts to the type of query to provide relevant and intuitive decision-making tools.
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Great search results. Relevant search results are still a top priority for people, yet Microsoft studies show that only one in four search queries deliver a satisfactory result. Bing helps identify relevant search results through features such as Best Match, where the best answer is surfaced and called out; Deep Links, allowing more insight into what resources a particular site has to offer; and Quick Preview, a hover-over window that expands over a search result caption to provide a better sense of the related site’s relevancy. Bing also includes one-click access to information through Instant Answers, designed to provide the sought-after information within the body of the search results page, minimizing the need for additional clicks.
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Organized search experience. More and more customers are regularly spending time with search engines, engaging in complex, multi-query and multi-session searches. Respondents also said an organized search experience would be twice as useful in helping find information and accomplishing tasks faster. Bing includes a number of features that organize search results, including Explore Pane, a dynamically relevant set of navigation and search tools on the left side of the page; Web Groups, which groups results in intuitive ways both on the Explore Pane and in the actual results; and Related Searches and Quick Tabs, which is essentially a table of contents for different categories of search results. Collectively, these and other features in Bing help people navigate their search results, cut through the clutter of search overload and get right down to making important decisions.
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Simplify tasks and provide insight. Microsoft’s research identified shopping, travel, local business and information, and health-related research as areas in which people wanted more assistance in making key decisions. The current state of Internet search isn’t optimised for these tasks, but the Bing Decision Engine is optimised for these key customer scenarios. For example, while a consumer is using Bing to shop online, the Sentiment Extraction feature scours the Internet for user opinions and expert reviews to help leverage the community of customers as well as product experts in trying to make a buying decision. In Bing Travel, the Rate Key compares the location, price and amenities of multiple hotels and provides a color-coded key of the best values, and the Price Predictor actually helps consumers decide when to buy an airline ticket in order to get the lowest prices.

The new brand portfolio will include the following changes to existing Microsoft programs:
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Microsoft’s mapping platform, Virtual Earth, will now be branded as Bing Maps for Enterprise. More information can be found here.
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Technology from Microsoft’s April 2008 acquisition of Farecast is now a central part of Bing Travel. More information coming soon.
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Microsoft’s popular cashback program, now dubbed Bing cashback, with more than 850 merchants and more than 17 million products available, will be fully integrated into the Bing Shopping experience.

Microsoft is committed to building better tools to help people find the shortest distance from their initial sear
ch query to the point of making an informed decision. Bing is an important first step toward this long-term vision and a strong indicator of Microsoft’s commitment to move search technology forward for customers.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realise their full potential.

* Ipsos 2009; 1,156 participants