Bing has come a considerable way since it was unveiled to the world in May 2009 by Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer at the ‘All Things Digital’ conferment taking place in California. That was six years ago, which is like a century in the digital world and in that time Bing has fought its corner of cyberspace and has been making an enormous effort to continually improve its search results and its variety of features. These days it delivers many updates daily and can look back at the period since inception as one of growth. Bing has evolved into what it is today not by accident but with a lot of effort on the part of its software engineers who have in the main risen to all of the technical challenges thrown at them. It was only four years ago that new features were added by their engineers on a monthly basis. These days there is an active, paralysed and hugely distributed system that has not only been the ‘real’ game changer for the development team at Bing but more importantly for the site’s highly demanding users. As with any global company, change is slow, and Microsoft is not an exception. However, when it comes to its search engine, this could not be further from the truth. Rather than being satisfied with being part of the crowd, Bing is trying its best to have an innovative approach to development and when it comes to making changes, can be very versatile and active. To make a difference, there is a need to ‘talk the talk’, and Bing has certainly showed commitment to the cause of living on the edge. It has more than 600 engineers employed at the sharp end of its operations which is a staggering growth of six times more than it employed just four years ago. It also completes 20,000 tests which is a big leap forward per submission attempt than it used to be. With feature submission times below 30 minutes, Bing has upped its game to meet the challenge. This challenge as we all know is a pretty fearsome one and comes from Google. All that Bing can keep doing to compete is what it has been doing for the past six years; invest, update, test and keep its users happy.
22nd January 2016
