Internet: Microsoft's Google Killer. They hope.

Microsoft say that bing isn't a search engine as such, it's a "decision engine." And they have registered the domain "decisionengine.com" to prove it. Going there shows a video that gets all excited about how Bing will help you find a French Restaurant in New York. And show you a map of Redmond in Seattle where Microsoft is based.

Just one teeny, weeny snag: Bing is being launched not in the USA but in Australia initially at the domain bing.com.au.

The service plans innovations in on-line shopping: a price predictor to tell you when will be the best time to buy an airline ticket. That could become self-defeating in a matter of hours if it proves popular as supplies will dry up and some may find there are no seats available after the bargain hunters have binged their way to the sites.

They say they "actually give you money back on great products." OK, so it's a shopping club?

But these are gimmicks. If Bing can deliver on its core promise, then it will be valuable. It says that it will prioritise results based on credibility. One of the major criticisms of Google is that its top entries are often nothing more than "Google-Grabbers" designed to bring traffic to a site that has no material purpose than to display adverts - often, of course, adverts that Google earns a share of.

But, there's just one problem that is going to be difficult to overcome.

Do the vacuum cleaning, and you "Hoover," search the web and you "Google."

Now "google" has become a verb, if you find something there, you have "googled" it. The act of doing it is "googling."

How many people are going to admit, publicly, to "binging."

Or perhaps that's another part of the reason for the name.