Online business Toolkit

Microsoft declares Bing UK ready for action

David Meyer ZDNet UK

Published: 13 Nov 2009 12:50 GMT

Microsoft's search engine, Bing, has come out of beta in the UK.

On Friday, Microsoft announced the official launch of the localised version of Bing, which allows users to search through UK-specific results. The site is also optimised to direct users to UK e-commerce sites, with price comparisons provided through a deal with Ciao UK.

Bing was first announced by Microsoft in late May, as a replacement for the company's Windows Live Search product. The UK got a beta version of Bing at the start of June.

"Bing is ready for the UK consumer, with our revolutionary way of searching the internet proving very popular," Microsoft's UK head of consumer and online, Ashley Highfield, said in a statement on Friday.

Highfield highlighted Bing features such as the integration of Twitter feeds and Visual Search — although this particular feature remains in beta and only provides pictures of travel destinations, which can be filtered by "most expensive" but not "cheapest" — and said they provided "a different and intuitive experience".

"This is by no means the end of our development," Highfield said. "We will continue to innovate and introduce new features on an ongoing basis by listening and responding to what UK search users find relevant. Removing our beta tag is merely the first step to signal Bing is here and already has features that are superior to those provided by other search engines."

According to analysis from Statcounter, Bing currently has a search-engine market share in the UK of 2.75 percent, just behind Yahoo on 3.27 percent. Google has a 92.06 percent market share.