What's in a name, Bing haters?

This episode of Recovery is brought to you by Keyboard Cat. Because this week needs played off something fierce.

The responses are in, Scott's wrung the votes out of the staff, and you all know at last the three names dubbed Better Than Bing. (Confidential to csurfer: I do love a math joke; confidential to arq_carlos1, if we had gold stars for individual editors' favorites you'd get mine.) And now that we've got that out of the way, might I ask you people what you'd rename Yahoo and Google?

Because honestly, after expecting that Microsoft would name the thing Kumo, I feared for the fate of the charming search engine I saw displayed all those months ago at Microsoft Research Day. "Kumo," however clever, would have hamstrung a nifty set of fresh search ideas with a moniker that sounded like a Stephen King monster.

"Bing," though, hits all the right notes for consumer-adoption purposes: it's fun to say, it's short, it's a familiar sort-of-word but nothing too fraught with meaning (or trademark issues), and you can spell this one. It evokes things most of us like, like Bing Crosby's voice and the strip club in The Sopranos (you got a problem with that?). And it's not too-clever-by-half, which... hey, remember cuil?

Cuil.com launched last year and I'm willing to bet you haven't been back since. I'm no longer sure how to pronounce it; as for typing, you know I'm not exactly Mavis Staples over here but so far I've spelled it wrong twice ("ciul," which takes you to a placeholder page, and "culo," which takes you somewhere very else). The choice was so perverse that a friend of the site actually built a Squidoo page to try to get people re-routed to the right spelling. It was so perverse that to write this paragraph, I ended up searching for the site on Google. Enough fail for you?

So let the hills ring with "Bing." It's hard to tell at first in a company town, and we're all neck-deep in the $100 million ad blitz right now. In fact, StatCounter numbers suggest that Bing is currently the second most-used search engine, though at this hour Market Share has them with a 6% US share behind Yahoo's 8% and Google's 57.4% -- wild times, in other words. If in a month Microsoft's search share is off by half or so, we can review the name choice in the well-appointed conference room inside your head.

And in the meantime, think back to the first times you heard "yahoo" (isn't that a word for "hick?") and "google" (STOP SPELLING IT WRONG! -- an even funnier reaction when you remember it's a made-up word twice over, by the way). Did you foresee market domination, or did you just have fun saying it and remember the name next time you needed to look something up?

In related news, I have also learned from this experience that no one still remembers the Name That Tune "I can name that tune in four notes or less" game, which makes me sad. And once again, Keyboard Cat approaches the Mighty Wurlitzer (another reference lost to the digerati)...

Let your geek flag fly and have a great weekend.