Aside from CEO Steve Ballmer scolding a Microsoft employee for flaunting an iPhone, Bing 2.0 was the biggest news to leak from a private company meeting on Thursday. Yes, it appears that the software giant is about ready to relaunch its search engine and great Google killer, according to a burst of unconfirmed employee tweets.
"Bing 2.0, out this month, has some exciting
new features ... Imagine seeing maps plus pics from the neighborhood of a restaurant to try," reads one tweet catalogued by ZDNet, while another
enthuses: "BING 2.0 terrific !! watch out guys ! bing + silverlight in maps = amazing !! goodbye google".
Still in heavy speculation mode, bloggers are eating the news up. "It looks like
Bing 2.0 will be big on map integration with Bing's search index," writes Search Engine
Journal. "Perhaps a Google Maps rival is in the pipeline and awaiting (a) release date."
Meanwhile, writes BetaNews: "If the early tweets are to be trusted, expect (Microsoft's browser
plug-in) Silverlight to play a much more major role in this iteration of the platform, in two critical areas: maps and location, and "search visualization" -- giving users the option of applying
graphical flare to the search process."
But, whether a few new bells and whistles will move the needle for Bing is hardly certain. Despite millions upon millions in marketing dollars,
the search engine still trails far behind Google.
Net Applications estimated that Google held 81.22% of search engine market share in June, followed by Yahoo at 9.21% ; Microsoft's Bing
at 5.31% and MSN Live at 0.66%. Hitwise, meanwhile found that Bing's market share was just 5.25% in June -- including MSN Search and Live.com.