Bing?

I've been trying, for the life of me, to figure out why on God's Green Earth the braintrust that is Microsoft picked "Bing" for their search engine name. I'll I can come up with is maybe they're big Friends fans?

The company worked with, and spent major coin, with Interbrand to come up with Bing, which is meant to evoke the "aha" moment of finding what you're looking for. Hey, why not "Aha" guys? Other candidates were said to include Sift and Kumo. Both sound like Native American words for Dookie.

"We looked a name that was short, easily recognizable, we could own it. Something that was easy to type into the search box," says Danielle Tiedt, general manager for online audience business group marketing at Microsoft. Wait, hang on. You have to type Bing into the Google search box? Danielle - really, I don't think you understand how this is supposed to work, do you?

Is 'Bing' catchier than Microsoft's previous search-engine name Windows Live? Maybe. I always imagined an oversized plush windows characters like a sand dial or a cursor lip-synch performing to toddlers... but that's me. (see photo illustration)

At Google's I/O event, meanwhile, co-founder Sergey Brin declined to comment directly on Bing, but noted that "we're pretty happy" with the name Google.

At least Wolfram Alpha has 'wolf' in its name. Oh, and you can ask Wolfram|Alpha if it is SkyNet...