So what’s with the name Bing? Besides the last name of the wisecracking member of Friends, I’m hard pressed to come to terms with it. Dictionary.com defines it as a noun meaning heap or pile or a verb meaning to go. And of course, the bing cherry is one of our most popular cherries. In some circles it’s another word for jail or prison and most recently it’s been touted as the moniker for Microsoft’s new search engine to replace Live.

We have some credible information to that end. Microsoft has registered the domain bing.com.au and bing.co.uk and Ad Age has reported that the world's largest software company will spend in the neighborhood of $80 to $100 million to advertise and brand the Bing search engine.

Just to borrow a Chandler Bing joke, "Rock, hardplace, me" might summarize Microsoft's position in the search engine game. It's lagged miserably behind Google and slightly behind Yahoo! April 2009 data from comScore showed that almost 65 percent of the searches conducted were on Google, with Yahoo! second at 20.4 percent and Microsoft placed third with 8.2 percent.

I'm actually quite happy that Microsoft sees the urgency to making a better search engine if only to improve on the relevance of search results. It's Live Search does produce results that are not easily found on Google or Yahoo! and I see that everyday. Google's results for certain searches are terrible on the relevance scale, (the same applies to Yahoo! and Live) and you certainly do have to go beyond the first three pages to get meatier and more valid information. Credit that to crafty SEO practices. Researchers and information seekers, hopefully, will be rewarded with Bing. Then maybe the funny name thing becomes less relevant.