A better Bing? Betanews 'Name That Search Engine' contest winners

It's not as easy as it looks, is it? The key here was to come up with not only a better name for a search engine than "Bing" (among those who believe there is one), but a tagline that would help frame a marketing campaign for the product. We didn't care whether the .com name for the URL was already taken. That's never stopped Microsoft before, including with Live.com -- if the name's good enough, it would have the resources to put down serious money for it.

Six Betanews staff members cast votes for first, second, and third place, with first place getting three points, second place two, and third place one. After a week of intense competition (I have to exhaust my bucket of superlatives somewhere), here are the final results:

1st place: ConceptJunkie with NARO. "Why wade through a million search results? NARO it down to what you want." (12 points)

2nd place: PC_Tool with RESULT. "It's not the search. It's the answer." (8 points)

3rd place: Straspey with MUSE (Microsoft Universal Search Engine). "Search the universe through our window." (5 points)

There was a very, very tight race for third place, with Coolbuster's QUERY tying for points. How would the tie be broken? Both QUERY and MUSE had three staff members voting on their behalf. And both had one first-place vote: Scott Fulton liked QUERY because it's direct, dry, and dowdy like himself; Tim Conneally liked MUSE because it's clever and "decidedly dorky." (Right, and "Bing" isn't dorky?)

So it came down to the slimmest of hairs for the tie-breaking vote, which ended up being cast by one of the slimmest of editors. Editor-in-Chief Nate Mook cast a third-place vote for MUSE, which put it on the podium.
Congratulations to our winners, and yes you actually do win stuff. Make certain the e-mail addresses in your Betanews profiles are up-to-date, and we'll be in touch.

First Prize: The four-disc Batman Begins / Dark Knight Blu-ray combo pack, plus a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate.

Second Prize: A copy of Gears of War II for Xbox 360, plus a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate.

Third Prize: A copy of Office 2007 Home/Student Edition.