Mike Nichols

Microsoft's revamp of its search engine under the name Bing gives the company a third online brand -- adding to the original MSN and the relative newcomer Windows Live in its stable of Internet properties. It might seem like a lot, but each has a distinct and important role in Microsoft's online strategy, said the general manager of the company's search team in an interview this afternoon.

That was one of several topics addressed by Microsoft search GM Mike Nichols in the phone conversation from California, where Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled the revamped search engine this morning. Read on for excerpts from the interview.

Q: Do you aspire to have Bing become a verb, in the same way Google is?

Nichols: I don't think that we necessarily aspire to that. That's something Steve talked a bit about at the conference today -- something that a product has to earn over a period of time that it is the definitive service for that particular category. We had several different requirements for the name of the product. No. 1 is, we wanted something that was short, that we could get worldwide, that you could spell, and when people would first hear that word, that the things in their mind would be around precision, and cutting through the clutter. The quote inside the team is, "The sound of found." That's the idea behind the brand name.

Q: You now have three online brands: MSN, Windows Live and Bing. Does Windows Live fade into the background and go away at this point?

Nichols: No, no. The idea is to really focus the brands. It's clear MSN is a portal, that's where you go to get great content, great trusted content. Windows Live is about connecting people with other people and information that they're looking for through email, Messenger, etc., as a logical extension of the core Windows experience. What we really want to do with our search brand, Bing, is to be clear about the fact that there is this experience that is 100 percent geared toward search. So it's really just a matter of focusing, it's not really a prioritization of any of the three, or necessarily setting one in the background.

Q: In terms of the technology, is Bing really all that different from what you've had in the past?

Nichols: There are a number of differences. ... The industry is really at an inflection point because there's all this information content that's available. People had turned to search to help with that, but as we've seen, when you look at the data of how people are interacting with search broadly across the category, you find, woah, there's some opportunities here to actually innovate.

So the areas we demonstrated today at the conference were how do you provide much better results -- beyond core algorithmic relevance, which we do very well and are continuing to improve -- to think about it from a user's perspective. How do you really innovate in ways like improving the ability to do navigational queries, improving the ability to get a preview of the sites that you're going to click on so that you don't have so many wasted clicks. Organizing all the content on the web, or the different results that you can get from a query, so that they're easier to traverse. ... And you've got those end-to-end scenarios in areas where people are trying to make decisions, like shopping and travel and local and all those types of things.

So the entire package, we think, is a really nice step forward for consumers.

Q: Do you have specific goals or ideas in mind about what this will do for your search market share?

Nichols: Yes, we have internal goals. None that we're going to share publicly at this point, but yes, we do have goals that we're tracking.

Q: I imagine those goals are up. Is that a safe assumption?

Nichols: That's a safe assumption. One thing I would say about that is there are a range of metrics. Customer satisfaction is a metric. Query share obviously is a metric. Revenue, the business goals that we owe our shareholders are a metric. All of these things contribute to the all-up opinion. We try not to focus only on one metric, or lose sight of important metrics.

Q: Did you think about putting an exclamation point at the end of the name?

Nichols: (Laughs) That one I haven't been asked. That's funny. I think pretty much every option that we possibly could have pursued was probably considered at one point. I don't know if that was ever one of the top variants under consideration.

Q: Well, obviously one company out there is iconic for its exclamation point, and that's Yahoo. How did the possibility of a Yahoo deal factor into the company's thinking about rolling out Bing?

Nichols: Not really, it didn't really factor into it. The way we've talked about a potential deal with Yahoo is the fact that it's a potential accelerant to our strategy but it's not the strategy itself. The strategy is, have a great product with a clear brand, and make people aware of it, make sure it's broadly distributed. Those are the things we're really focused on.