Blog

And by Meagan Dalton, summer intern from Douglas S. Freeman High School in Henrico County, Virginia

On a fall day in 1997, so the myth goes, Larry Page and a few of his fellow Stanford grad students were discussing a name for their new Internet project. One suggested googolplex, a term meaning 10 to the 100th power, which the group then shortened to googol. When they searched to see if the name was in use, they misspelled the term as “Google.” Seeing the name was available, they bought it. Now Google, for all the world, is a noun and verb, synonymous with search. The site accounts for 90 percent of Internet searches. More than a brand, Google is the Internet user’s natural habitat.

Bing, Microsoft’s recently re-launched search engine, which is intended to be a competitor to Google, was named in a much more self-conscious fashion. Microsoft’s Live Search had failed to make gains on Google, and when it came time to name the new, much-researched and much-hyped iteration, an ad agency was brought in. One can only guess how many focus groups the agency conducted before settling on Bing, which is, apparently, meant to evoke the sound of an “aha” moment.

Really? Those moments make noise?

What’s more likely is that Microsoft’s hired men chose the name because it sounds creative, at least in a late-1990s, razor-scooter, foosball-table-in-the-conference-room way, because it evokes not the aha moment but the start-up creative process that produced winners like Google.

But coming from Microsoft in 2009, the name seems self-regarding and media-ready, like the names that celebrities give their children; one thinks of Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale naming their kid “Zuma.”

Really, Stefani and Rossdale ought to have Googled the name beforehand, because “Zuma” is not only a beach near Los Angeles (this they surely knew), but a popular online game, a monolith in Nigeria, the surname of the president of South Africa, a kind of Yamaha scooter, an album by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, and a Filipino comic-book character—in short, all the things you’d want your child’s name to evoke.

While it’s too early to call Bing a failure, Microsoft would likely have done better had they gone with a name chosen through a less-cynical process. They would have done better, too, with a slower, smaller launch, letting word of mouth build among researchers, Twitterers and Internet obsessives, and being careful not to make the sort of grandiose claims that inspire schadenfreude.