Has Microsoft finally succeeded in search? With the roll out of Bing, previously know as Kumo, the company has generated a large amount of attention in a short amount of time within the blogosphere. The question is… Does the hype live up to what was delivered?

The company was obviously hurting with the failure of Microsoft Live search, a concept and approach that just did not connect with web users. Microsoft is repositioning Bing as a “decision engine,” with a goal “to provide customers with intelligent search tools to help them simplify tasks and make more informed decisions,” according to the company. A search for it in Google even returns a listing titled “Bing Decision Engine” in the paid search listings.

What’s different this go around? Is it just the marketing and packaging? That is a big part of it, but the introduction of Bing includes steps forward in the previous Live Search’s core search, such as entity extraction and expansion, query intent recognition and summarization of documents technologies. It also offers a new UX model, which changes based on the user’s query to offer more relevant decision-making tools along the way.

There as been a move by web applications to act as a “sherpa” along the way, helping users make the right choice about what their primary intent is. This approach has helped the e-commerce side, including Amazon. It will be interesting to see how this benefits the search providers as they adopt it as a standard.

Only time will tell how big Microsoft’s Bing will really impact search and how web users perceive it. Now it’s time to see what Google will do in response, specifically since Microsoft is riding such a large wave.

With all of the activity, news and information coming out of San Francisco this week at Web 2.0 Expo, deciding what to focus on has been a little overwhelming. In catching up on activity, I happened across a presentation by Jason Grigsby of Cloud Four. His presentation, titled “Native vs Hybrid vs Web” provides one of the most clearly communicated impact of the emerging mobile market (I know, its not really emerging, but after 10 years of mobile Web talk, the actions are finally catching up to the hype). Some of this may get a little geeky for you, but stick with it, because there are all kinds of nuggets in this deck that will expand your understanding of the importance of mobile web…