Hooking on Bing

Though the naming of Bing has been quite well covered I enjoyed this brief post from BusinessWeek on the process behind the naming - The Dubbing of 'Bing'. An initial list of 2000 names to 600 then to 60 or so and then down to 8. Another name on that short list was “Hook” along with the eventual codename of Kumo.

Bing won out, says Microsoft's Danielle Tiedt, who manages the search engine's marketing, partly because it was close to the "aha!" sound in many languages. "It's short, appealing, memorable, active," says Jeremy Faro, a senior director at branding agency Landor Associates

Personally I like Bing and thus far it seems to be going down pretty well with my friends and family. The true test will be in a months time though to see if they’re reverted to Google or not.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 15, 2009
  I gave it a go and reverted to Google shortly after. Simplew searches such as: Windows XP Service Pack 3 Download The download page isn't in the the first couple of pages of Bing results and its the top result in Google. Simple searches like that need to be up to to the bar that Google has set, otherwise you end up wasting time wading through irrlevant results.

• Anonymous
  June 15, 2009
  Paulie - very useful feedback, thanks...have passed on to the bing team