Microsoft Launches the Bing Search Engine
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Microsoft launched Bing in June 2009 as the successor to Live Search. Competing with Google required far more than building a web crawler: a modern search engine had to index billions of pages, rank them quickly, fight spam, and learn from user behavior.
Bing emphasized “decision engine” features such as structured results for travel, shopping, health, and local queries. Underneath, search ranking combined link analysis, text relevance, freshness, geographic signals, and many other features. Machine learning increasingly determined how those signals were weighted.
The launch also mattered strategically. Later in 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo agreed that Bing would power Yahoo’s search results. That gave Microsoft’s index and advertising system a larger query volume, which is valuable because search quality improves when engineers can observe more real user interactions.