Microsoft rebranding Bing search engine for better visibility

New Delhi, Aug 30 (IANS) Microsoft is working to rebrand its search engine Bing and the developer community has witnessed visible changes to the service in the recent past.

There’s no official announcement to date but Microsoft has either expanded what appears to be A/B testing – where some people see the old Bing brand and logo and some see “Microsoft Bing” – or has completely switched to the new style, according to Paul Thurrott, an award-winning technology journalist and blogger.

The new brand and logo ‘Microsoft Bing’ appear to have made their way to the Bing homepage too.

It makes sense as Microsoft is a much bigger brand than just Bing. The tech giant has also renamed its Office 365 offering as Microsoft 365.

The company has also rebranded Windows Defender to Microsoft Defender.

Currently, Google dominates the search engine market. In June, Google had nearly 84 per cent market share while Bing had only 6 per cent (according to data from NetMarketShare).

In its fourth fiscal quarter 2020 revenue results, Microsoft said search advertising revenue decreased by 18 per cent or $353 million from the year-ago quarter as advertisers spent less on ads or paid search results.

Microsoft has also updated the Outlook for Android app to add Bing search integration to the long-press menu.

Some users who have Microsoft Outlook installed on their Android devices have noticed seeing a new option to perform a Bing search when selecting text.

After opening the Outlook app to check an email and if a user long presses on a word in the email text, a pop-up menu will appear with three options: Web Search, Translate and Bing Search.

–IANS

na/