Bing v Google: Microsoft launches rival search engine

Global - Microsoft has taken a bold step in its online search battle with Google and today unveiled a new search engine call Bing.

Asia is to set to be a big focus for Bing as search technology centres have been set up in China, Japan and India. The business model for Bing is that it will be advertising-funded with sponsored search listings.

Bing has initially been launched in the US and Canada, and beta worldwide. Microsoft said more features will be added to bing.com over the next year in regions across the year, including Asia Pacific. Bing will become available on 3 June.

JWT globally will be working on the $100 million marketing campaign to promote Bing. Initiatlly the campaign will be focused on the US.

A Microsoft spokesperson said Bing is "the first step in going beyond's today search experience". Microsoft cited research than many web users are dissatisified with current search engines and hopes to attract these users.

"It's a new consumer brand that stands exclusively for search. Today is the first step in a long journey.

In response to the launch of Bing, Google released this statement to Marketing: "We welcome competition that helps deliver useful information to users and expands user choice. Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space - it makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that."