Hey Jeff, Bing is a Startlike rip-off!

This week the world was introduced to Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Almost immediately, I started getting messages alerting me that Microsoft had “ripped off” Startlike. I assume they are referring to the background photos and image tags on the Bing start page.

Well, photo backgrounds and image tagging are nothing new and many sites employ similar functionality. Let me just clear the air by saying I don’t see Bing as a Startlike “rip-off”. Bing is as a search engine that happens to use a photo background. Startlike is a start page covering a topic you are passionate about with a new image and a few hotlinks every day. It has the basic functionality you need, like web search powered by Google, along with tools to explore your passion and meet others who share your interest. While they might have some similarities at first glance, Startlike and Bing are very different. In fact, I am excited about Bing for a few reasons.

It’s $100 Million+ of consumer education for Startlike.
Since Startlike has some unique core features (specifically a photo background that changes daily with image tag hotlinks) it requires basic user education before diving into the nuts and bolts. With Microsoft spending $100 million promoting Bing, many new people will experience this functionality. Hopefully, when they later visit Startlike for the first time they will already have an idea of how those basics work and we can jump to explaining our organization by interest channels to quickly make the site more relevant to them.

We need a true competitor to Google.
Microsoft is our best chance to provide a real search alternative. Google is great, and we obviously selected them to power search on Startlike. However, having just one entity parse and disseminate the world’s information is a bit unsettling. Hopefully Bing will become a viable alternative. If so, I believe the competition will push both companies to do more and better things.


I’ll be watching to see how Bing is received and how it develops from here. I did notice their image tags look a little better than ours. Perhaps we should spruce things up a bit…;-)