Thursday, May 28th, 2009 - 7:50 PM

You can verb Bing. Kind of.

In You can’t verb Live Search I criticized the name “Live Search”. Microsoft has announced its new search portal… or “Decision Engine”, Bing.

Yeah, you can verb Bing. Kind of. People can say “bing it!” instead of “google it!” (and it only sounds SLIGHTLY profane)… but what’s the past tense of bing? Binged? That might work in speech, but not in writing. Written, it’s past tense for binge, which has strong negative connotations (the present participle is similarly troubled). Will people be comfortable blogging/chatting about how they “binged” for something?

When I mentioned Bing to my wife, she almost immediately came up with bung as a past tense verb. Ack! I am NOT Cornholio!

It’s only a name though. The name Bing definitely seems like an improvement over Live Search, and it IS very easy to type. I’m interested in seeing how people like the way it actually works.