I want to see a search engine make a serious dent in Google’s market share. For surfers, and advertisers, real competition could only be good. But Bing is not it.

Bing was due to go live by Thursday New Zealand time. But it launched worldwide last night, giving the search engine a little extra buzz.

Microsoft’s remade, rebranded search engine is quite capable. But I don’t see myself using it more than I use Live.com, which it replaces. That is, only occasionally. For these reasons:

1. It doesn’t filter results by date - a crucial ability that Google added just weeks ago. It’s the little things that matter.

2. The AWOL subcategory tabs. Running various queries (‘cheapest flight Auckland to Wellington’, ‘cheapest place to buy a laptop’ etc), I’m seeing nothing of Bing’s promised four “helper” sub-categories - shopping, local, travel and health - which are supposed to make it the “decision making” search engine.

While US Bing users get a full-service reservation system, here I get a generic list of the familiar contenders (House of Travel, Flight Centre, AirNZ) that's more or less the same as Google's but without any site indexing.

Presumably this is because the various services and partnershps that underlie the helper functions seem to be US-only. Wired raves about Bing’s ability to let you not just find a restaurant, but see reviews and directly book a table, thanks to US-specific Bing partnerships with Yelp.com and CitySearch. For New Zealand searches, there are links to a couple of generic menu sites, already available through Google and elsewhere for anybody who finds them useful.

By contrast, Google has always served relatatively New Zealand well, albeit partly through an accident of history (its Google Maps division is based in Sydney, by result of an acquisition).

But even with generic searches (eg, ‘pizza, mt eden’) Google does better, throwing up a Google Map with locations of relevant business (something it did ahead of its tie-up with Yellow). Bing throws up a list of links that could have been delivered by Live.com.

For a wide variety of local searches, Bing delivers results that are only as good as Google - at best - and not as well organised. To break Google’s 90% stranglehold on search here, it will have to be better.

3. Microsoft’s branding is still incoherent. Some people like “Bing”, others hate it. But Microsoft has although the URL for its search engine’s former name (Live.com) now redirects to Bing.com, the new search engine has links to Microsoft’s other online services (Live Spaces, Live SkyDrive etc), which are still being peddled under the Live monicker. And every time I write about Live Mail, I have to check how it intersects with Hotmail.

4. The much-vaunted preview option is clumsy. You don’t get it by hovering directly over a search result link but by mousing over to an orange bar on the right.

5. Not selling itself: At least in its Australasian incarnation, Bing is barely alluring to advertisers. Google has an Advertising Programs link on its home page, which takes you to a page that slickly explains Google AdWords and AdSense, including case studies. With another click, you can get real-life examples of pricing, and sign up online.

Bing, by contrast, buries its advertising link one click down, and it takes you to a page that predominantly pushes advertising options for NineMSN.com.au and MSN.co.nz, with a toll-free number and email address for finding out more information. It seems very 1995.

Why Microsoft still needs Yahoo
The broader problem is that Bing has no scale, and thus no appeal to search advertisers (bearing in mind that sponsored search is currently the only way known to man for making a buck online). Google has 90% search share here, and 60% plus worldwide. Microsoft Live/Bing holds less than 10% worldwide, and less in some countries. And Bing has no killer feature. Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer admitted to The Wall Street Journal that it will take years for Bing to catch Google, even with Bing’s $US100 million branding campaign.

But Microsoft doesn’t have years. In that amount of time, Google could easily parlay its huge lead in search to dominate software-as-a-service in general.

The only way for Microsoft to make a real leap forward is to buy Yahoo, or to enter into a partnership in which Bing serves search results, and ads, to Yahoo’s audience too. That would give Microsoft a more competitive 25% or 26% of the market.

Otherwise, forget it.