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teve Ballmer has finally taken the wraps off Bing, Microsoft's latest (last?) attempt to topple Google and Yahoo off their search engine pedestals, at the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital Conference.

The search engine at Bing.com currently shows a "bing and decide" tagline with "Coming soon" underneath. Clicking on the "Find out more" link bring the user to a decisionengine website where a video (powered by Adobe Flash) explores the possibilities offered by Bing.

Interestingly, the decisionengine.com website allows user to follow Bing on Twitter and on Facebook and share the page through many other media; this shows to some extent that Microsoft is ready to use competing channels to get the message across.

So it looks that Microsoft will be focusing on labelling Bing as a "decision engine" rather than a mere search engine like Google or Yahoo. Bing will target four key areas at the beginning, including planning journeys, finding local businesses, making purchasing decisions and probing a health condition.

Ashley Highfield, the managing director of consumer and online for Microsoft in the UK (and incidentally the former Director of the Future Media and Technology group at the BBC), said in a statement that "Having a single dominant player in any market is a huge opportunity. Agencies and clients are crying out for a rival to Google."

The problem though will be to lure a critical mass of internet users into using Bing in the same place. Bing, as it stands now, looks to be more like a portal rather than a simple search engine and because it should be able to answer more complex questions, this puts it squarely in the same league as Wolframalpha.