Microsoft sued over Bing name

by admin December 20, 2009 at 9:10 pm

There are those who believe that Microsoft came up with the name Bing for its refreshed search engine after staring at the word “Bingo” for several days and then removing the last letter.

However, a small entity in St. Louis has decided that the name Bing was, is and always should be, theirs.

According to Ars Technica, Bing Information Design! has designs on some compensation from Microsoft, as it has used the delightful term, followed by a slightly less delightful exclamation point, ala Yahoo, since 2000.

Even to the most bleary eyes, Bing Information Design’s Web site does not immediately stir confusion with Bing the search engine. Bing Information Design is “dedicated to taking tough, hard-to-define concepts and boiling them down into simple, easy-to-understand ideas.”

So perhaps there might be those who would prefer a few pictures that would engender easy-to-understand ideas that might explain one thing: how could anyone confuse a massively promoted search engine from Microsoft with a minimally known company whose two founders “have over 25 years of experience in design, illustration, branding, information architecture and publishing”?

Read more: news.cnet.com