It’s nice to have my opinions about something, even if in a round about way, verified as being even close to on the money. It doesn’t happen very often and especially not from the level of a Steve Ballmer.

I took a lot of flack recently over a post I wrote at The Inquisitr that took Microsoft to task over calling their relaunch of their search engine under the Bing brand. The point that I tried to make and have made in the past is that as much as Microsoft might have a search engine that is on par with Google it won’t matter. It has boiled down to being a marketing of the verb game.

Even with a killer search platform Microsoft has forgotten the most important thing – Google owns the culture. It owns the verb. How often have you seen someone write “I googled you last night”, or said “I’ll google that for you and get right back”. Google has become the search language verb. From pretty well primary school right through to the grave Google has become the defacto word for search.

So it was rather interesting to find out today as I read through all the blog posts following up on Microsoft’s announcement about Bing, and when it would go live (June 3), that Steve Ballmer acknowledged that the ‘verb’ was important (emphasis mine) .

Asked about the name onstage at the D7 conference, CEO Steve Ballmer admits: “I am not what you would call the creative side of life. Short matters. Being able to verb up can be helpful.” But he also says, “We wanted something that unambiguously says search.”

Source: TechCrunch

While they might not have taken my advise it is nice to see that what I was trying to say was a part of the process they might have gone through. As to whether Bing will change the search landscape – I sincerely doubt it but any new ideas are more than welcome as it is the only way that search will get better. So I’m looking forward to giving Bing a try as soon as I can – even if I think the name sucks.