Bing There

Naming your new search engine after a character from Friends may not be the most auspicious start to Microsoft's latest attempt to gain back ground from Google, but their soon-to-be-launched engine, Bing, seems well thought through, combining contextual search results with price comparison features.

Google is a company strangely devoid of innovation. Oh, sure it invents software and technology stuff, but innovation is about the ability to come up with new commercial and business models. Its core business models were copied from GoTo and AltaVista and it seems to put huge store on hiring brilliant engineers, but not great strategic thinkers. Any other company failing to commercialise over 90% of its R&D projects (my estimation) would be out of business by now.

But, back to Redmond, where I still believe a changing of the guard is long overdue. Until we use Bing, of course, there's no telling how indifferent it is, but let this list inform you of how difficult it is to break into this field.

For video, the situation is even more complex, and the unified 'Video Search EPG' still seems a long way away despite offerings from companies like Blinkx, TVTV, Locate TV and TIOTI.

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