I keep thinking about Microsoft’s search engine Bing, and wondering how it’s been stacking up in the last year or so. It debuted last year in June, and thus far its progress has been anything but extraordinary since it’s only maintaining a 3% adoption rate among search engine users. Still, the operating system has a neat gimmick with it’s advertising, Bing, the decision engine.

The advertising is interesting, since it sheds light on one of those issues that most people take for granted, when is too much information, too much of a good thing?

The idea behind Google was a relatively simple one, make searches simple to use, make them fast, and allow people to search the entire internet if they need to in order to find exactly what they are looking for. The idea for Bing is a little different, a little more streamlined; searching should be focused on on large sites with the broadest possible amount of information available to be gleaned from the site. The user then can focus their category to get better results. Think of Bing as more of cheat card, where as Google is more of an encyclopedia.

When you think about the differences, you’ll probably say, well who cares, but when you realize, that a lot of the sites we look up over and over again are within a certain range of popular online destinations such as Mapquest, Expedia, flowers, Amazon, Buy.com, fantasy football; a site that can provide quickest destination to what could be argued the best of all possible sites could be just what the doctor ordered for a number of people.

That said, Bing hasn’t jumped ahead of anyone at this point, and it’s not likely that they will anytime soon, but it’s an interesting topic to keep ones eye on, especially as people begin to demand more from their wireless devices, laptops, and cell phones. With Google and Apple owning nearly all of the current mobile device operating system market, Microsoft is just barely able to keep pace in what is possibly one of the most important emerging consumer markets of this century. A specialty market where speed and simplicity could be big assets in a search engine with the clout to actually take advantage of it.

That said, Microsoft really needs for Bing to work, and they really need it to work with the rest of their product line up if they want to really capture peoples attention.

People have to need to adopt a new way of thinking with this technology, not just redress an old one, and the company that delivers that will be the company, or companies, that really defines our relationship with this technology and makes it an experience both unique and exemplifies how we best want to live our lives.

But if nothing else, at least the commercials are fun to watch.