
After a week of semantic scuffling, our staff has come up with the medalists in the race to make a better search engine name than “Bing.”
By the Betanews Staff | Published June 5, 2009 here
It’s not as easy as it looks, is it? The key here was to come up with not only a better name for a search engine than “Bing” (among those who believe there is one), but a tagline that would help frame a marketing campaign for the product. We didn’t care whether the .com name for the URL was already taken. That’s never stopped Microsoft before, including with Live.com — if the name’s good enough, it would have the resources to put down serious money for it.
Six Betanews staff members cast votes for first, second, and third place, with first place getting three points, second place two, and third place one. After a week of intense competition (I have to exhaust my bucket of superlatives somewhere), here are the final results:
1st place: ConceptJunkie with NARO. “Why wade through a million search results? NARO it down to what you want.” (12 points)
2nd place: PC_Tool with RESULT. “It’s not the search. It’s the answer.” (8 points)
3rd place: Straspey with MUSE (Microsoft Universal Search Engine). “Search the universe through our window.” (5 points)
There was a very, very tight race for third place, with Coolbuster’s QUERY tying for points. How would the tie be broken? Both QUERY and MUSE had three staff members voting on their behalf. And both had one first-place vote: Scott Fulton liked QUERY because it’s direct, dry, and dowdy like himself; Tim Conneally liked MUSE because it’s clever and “decidedly dorky.” (Right, and “Bing” isn’t dorky?)
So it came down to the slimmest of hairs for the tie-breaking vote, which ended up being cast by one of the slimmest of editors. Editor-in-Chief Nate Mook cast a third-place vote for MUSE, which put it on the podium. Congratulations to our winners, and yes you actually do win stuff. Make certain the e-mail addresses in your Betanews profiles are up-to-date, and we’ll be in touch.


















The expectation, according to the press release, is that the new app will “appeal to the 70 percent of the 650 million phone owners in China who own Java-based phones.” By way of background, GyPSii is already locally available in China for the major operators China Mobile and China Unicom, for download on compatible Java phones. GyPSii is also available globally across a wide range of devices, including Samsung, Nokia, LG, Apple iPhone, and BlackBerry smartphones.
June 5th, 2009 at 7:42 am Googeliantic
June 5th, 2009 at 7:57 am edithomeric
June 5th, 2009 at 8:02 am hindering
June 5th, 2009 at 8:08 am Hi Charles,
I’m flying the flag over at my site and encouraging readers there to provide their input. My description is “alarming” – but let’s remember that mobile search is a very different animal. As I have told companies at your networking event last year: Mobile is wide open. innovation is welcome and the winners (yes, plural!) have yet to be decided.
June 5th, 2009 at 8:19 am Daunting
June 5th, 2009 at 8:33 am Huge
June 5th, 2009 at 8:53 am Googlelicious
Google’s lead is attributed to its “stickiness” with its audience. As more and more people have a pleasant search experience with Google, they tend to tell their friends and so forth. The real genius of Google, is that they appeal to so many people on so many levels. As for me, I like their “Open Source” attitude about the Internet Community and I think many people like that sense of transparency, which makes Google very appetizing to so many.
June 5th, 2009 at 8:57 am empire (or wempire)
@kerendg
June 5th, 2009 at 10:48 am Brin-tastic
June 5th, 2009 at 10:57 am Temporary.
June 5th, 2009 at 11:29 am Dangerous
June 5th, 2009 at 11:50 am monopoly
June 5th, 2009 at 12:03 pm Rediculoogle
June 5th, 2009 at 12:22 pm Googlewhelming!