Mircosoft’s new search engine Bing: sick or cold?
June 9, 2009 – 6:03 pmMicrosoft some days ago released their new search engine Bing to the public. Apart from the question “Is Bing any good, compared to Google?” there is another one: What does Bing mean? Having a little knowledge in Chinese, this word sounds suspicious to me. And Bing does sound Chinese is some way, Mandarin Chinese to be exact. Here are my two ideas:
病 bìng – sickness
冰 bīng – ice
I’ve taken a look at one of those promotion videos of the searchengine Bing on Youtube and it becomes clear, that the correct pronunciation is indeed bìng, so sickness should be the correct translation of this Microsoft searchengine. Maybe 冰 would be cool in some way, but they obviously missed this opportunity. Feel free to have a look for Yourself:
In China however, sickness Bing is no longer Bing. At least the Chinese marketing team realized, that sickness Bing is not a good way to describe this new product. They decided to give it different name in China: 必应 bìyīng. Now what does that mean? I have no real clue what that means, but I feel it’s cheating.
Talking about the quality of Bing, it yet has to be seen if it can beat the Google searchengine. Still I get most of my traffic from Google, and little comes from Live Search / Bing. To be honest, only one visitor came from 病 so far. Here are two nice Chinese words to learn for You:
精神病 jīng shén bìng – mental disorder (medical)
神精病 shén jīng bìng – mental disorder (insult)
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4 Responses to “Mircosoft’s new search engine Bing: sick or cold?”
Well, I don’t like Bing, it doesn’t find my blog, because Blogger is Google’s. I’ll stick to the latter one. It’s good that Google gets some competition, but I doubt that bing will be able to do something. I think even Yahoo is better.
Well, Chinese term ‘bi ying’ is probably a phonetic transliteration of English ‘bing’. And as you figured out, ‘sickness’ and ‘ice’ doesn’t sound good, so they changed it to ‘bi ying’. As far as I know, 必 and 应 both mean ‘must’. So it’s not meaning related, but just a mere transliteration.
By Nino on Jun 9, 2009
my initial test result shows that Bing is as good as Google when displaying relevant search results. Google might be having a tough competitor with Microsofts own search engine.
By detoxdiet on Aug 6, 2009
Bing does give search results much like Google but i would have to say that Google still gives more relevant search results
By Jade on Oct 21, 2009
i have been using the BING search engine for a couple of weeks. it seems to be as good as Google but for some reason i would still want to stick with Google search engine
By Jimmy Sy on Nov 2, 2009