The long awaited Microsoft response to Google has nearly arrived. Unveiled earlier in May, the site known as "Bing" will serve as Miscrosoft's primary search engine, eliminating the flagging Live.com and MSN Search. Miscrosoft has intelligently laid off the heavy branding and instead is offering up a new nonsensical word that they hope will soon trump Google. (i.e. instead of saying 'why don't you Google it?' insert Bing.)

The clear challenge here is that Microsoft has to persuade people that Google somehow isn't cutting it despite the fact that most consumers say they are satisfied with Google search. Microsoft claimes that their own behavioral studies of internet usage show that people spend too much time tweeking their query to find the information they really want, often abandoning a search altogether in frustration.

Hence, Microsoft is positioning Bing as a "decision engine" vs. a search engine, although Bing doesn't actually make decisions for people. Rather, it contains some useful filters that can, in some cases, help people sort through search results more easily. In other instances, it actually resolves queries within the search results. A search for "NBA playoffs," for example, will bring up links to sites such as NBA.com but will first show the current series score as well as results of recent games and a schedule of upcoming ones.

Okay, well and good. So here's the test: Let's Google, er... I mean, query, "Teton Weather."

Results:

While it appears both engines have nice weather forecasting above the search results, they also both misunderstood "Teton" as the town in Idaho, not the more common understanding as the mountain range & corresponding county in Wyoming—something I assumed Microsoft wanted to fix with the launch of Bing. Other differences were that while Bing brought up weather.com twice in the top three results, it was smart enough to prioritize Teton Village rather than Idaho and placed Grand Teton National Park weather second. Google on the other hand prioritized the GTNP first, mountainweather.com second (my personal favorite for local weather) and Teton County, WY third. Pretty damn spot on.

In this statistically insignificant test, Google remains king. Better luck next time Bing.