Based on the reactions of people I've watched TV with, the Microsoft advertising is doing a great job of getting the name out there and making people feel good about the brand. Everybody is curious about what nonsense the characters are going to come up with and a few of them even imitate the "bing!" sound effect. But, I asked a few of them if they've actually tried Bing and they said no. They all just use whatever's set in the browser's search box and they see prompts for changing the default search engine as a commonplace annoyance ("Every time I download a program, it always want to install some toolbar or something.")

Anyway, I think the name was a great choice.

Sounds like a working title that stuck.

First hit of above search for me: Urban Dictionary: bing 10 Aug 2003 - BING. Best Information Not Google.

Congratulations on being a whole lot smarter than me :) (don't worry about it, you probably share that distinction with a large part of the population of the planet).

And is there any take on this being an oversight or was it on purpose ?

But within a week of the new engine being announced (or rather renamed) it was pointed out by TC and other news outlets.

none taken, hence the :)

> But within a week of the new engine being announced (or rather renamed) it was pointed out by TC and other news outlets.

I completely missed that, I was pretty busy with other stuff when bing launched.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=632022

commented on plausible interpretations of "bing" as a Chinese word. Without tone markings, it's hard to know whether joking that it means "ice" makes more sense than joking that it means "sick," and in any event the official Microsoft rendering of "Bing" in Chinese turns the pronunciation into "bi ying," as indicated in the link above.

Actually, I like Bing better than I thought I would; for one thing, the background pictures :-)

Also Microsoft is very generous with providing free REST style search and spelling APIs (it took about 2 minutes to write a Ruby client, which I posted here http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/06/ruby-client-for-search-an...)

I am pretty much "anti Microsoft", but I try to not be dogmatic about it :-)

Bing is Not Gratifying. Bing is Nothing Great. Bing is Notoriously Godawful. Bing is Nefarious Google.

Or to be really rebellious one can find positive acronyms for Bing. :-p

Or maybe they are just starting.