A year from now, if you hear someone say that – and actually understand what they mean – Bill Gates wants to be a happy billionaire.

That is because it wants to be a sign that Microsoft is finally making progress in its quest to challenge Google in the Internet search business.

Bing, the name Microsoft gave to the new search service it unveiled Thursday, is its answer to Google – a noun that meant little once but has become part of the language as a verb that is a synonym for executing a web search. After months of, uh, searching, Microsoft settled on Bing to replace the all-too-forgettable Live Search, which itself replaced MSN Search.

Microsoft invested billions of dollars in those services and failed to slow Google’s rise, so a new name certainly can not hurt.

Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that neither Bing wants to evoke a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound – the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” moment when a search leads to an answer.

The name is meant to Conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people with complex tasks like shopping for a camera, said Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s online audience business group.

And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “joined up” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and does not have negative connotations unusual.”

Some branding experts said choosing the name Bing was a good start, but also the easiest part of the challenge facing the company, since most people turn to Google without even thinking about it.

Michael Cronan, whose consulting firm helped come up with brands like TiVo and Amazon’s Kindle, said Bing’s sound, brevity and “ing” ending were all positive.

“It has a promise that you are going to find what you are looking for, and that’s great,” Mr. Cronan said. “But its success is entirely wrapped up in the quality of the experience that Microsoft can deliver.”

Peter Sealey, a former chief marketing officer at the Coca-Cola Company, said Microsoft should have picked a name that connotes more directly search.

“Bing has no equity, it signals nothing,” Mr. Sealey said. “It is going to be an enormous expense to create an image for this thing called Bing.”

Google’s name is a play on the word googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The company has said the name speaks to its ambitious mission to organize all the world’s information.

Asked about Microsoft’s choice of name at a press conference on Thursday, Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, said he did not know enough about the new service to comment on it. Then he deadpanned: “We’ve been pretty happy with the name Google.”

Meanwhile, some tech people were already noting that Bing is also an unfortunate acronym: “But It’s Not Google.”

Microsoft on Thursday the packages from Bing, the rebranded and rebuilt search engine, formerly code-named “Kumo, as a replacement for the Live Search. There is a solid improvement over the previous search product, and it proposes to Google in key areas. He will help Microsoft to gain search share in the economy. It is surprising to compete with Google.

Bing is not available to the public, but you do not have to wait long. From 1 June, some users get search results from Bing Live Search. On 3 June, we said that Bing is the new Microsoft standard search. We have early access to the service. Here is how it looks.

Hands on

In search of presentation, Bing wins. It uses technology from Powerset (a search technology company Microsoft acquired) to more refined versions of your query on the left side of the page. For example, I have for the game “Fallout 3″ on Google and Bing. Google has given me good results, Bing gave me a menu with links that walkthrough, news, and so on.

Bing also pop-ups is an excerpt of the text on a search result if you move the mouse pointer over them. That saves a lot of time if you are not quite sure if you want a result.

In the content of search results, Bing is not consistently superior to Google. In many searches, I have (not the sample I studied Microsoft), Google’s results were more relevant and useful. Not miles, mind, but in many cases of Google products supplied only enough better than Bing, to me the wisdom of accepting a substitute Bing search engine. Just one example: The search for “best house color to wet climate ‘gave me a better advice links at the top of search results in Google than Bing.

When looking for product reviews, the Google search results pages were mostly better than Bing’s – though again not much. However, Bing also collects user and expert reviews on many products, and this gives you a great overview. This feature is not always displayed, even if, and I would not even know it had it not for the review of the Wired Bing.

If you want to buy an item for you, both have very strong “Shopping” tab, organize good results. Google provides you with reviews for the seller, not the Bing. Bing, but offers a cash back program, which is hard to beat.

And in some research, obtained results Bing victory bet. When searching for “Sandberg Facebook” on Google, the top link was a story from the 2008th At the Bing, the top item was “News on Facebook Sandberg” very sublinks with three new items. In the search for ‘Obama’ Supreme Court, “Google News results show, but the link above was a day old story. Bing was 32 hours.

To be fair to Google, you can also click through to Google news, all the results and sort results by date. But that is extra clicks. Bing is more aggressive about including news.

All search engines have their strengths, and many of Bing’s lie in the areas where Microsoft has its own content businesses. For example, Microsoft considers the airfare prediction service Farecast, and it includes Farecast buying advice if you are searching for the plane. Bing also some medical data in the search engine itself.

Bing also not very good in at least one area in which Google should do better. The video search results page for “Thomas Jefferson” in Google gives you a vertical list of videos. At the Bing, you get a large grid, which is easier to scan, and a list of related videos on the left side for “George Washington, James Madison,” and so on. The search results are equivalent, but Bing presentation is far superior.

You should Bing

I planned to write this story with the title “Bing is not better,” but the new machine has given me over.

The new game is on the lookout for the analysis and presentation of information in the engine itself (see Wolfram alpha for the extreme example of this). Both Google and Bing, search and other products, the areas in which they collect information and the format for you, instead of just linking to external pages where the data resides. Bing has a very good work on this in several popular areas – such as reviews, Cinema, weather, travel, and stock prices.

While the service does not show all their treasures at once, it rewards exploration and yields pleasant surprises for users to POKE.

Google keeps improving in the area of search and sorting display as well, but Google makes Bing complacent, and that is not good for Google. For the period, Bing’s on in this game. Try this search engine. I do not think you regret it.