Once upon a time, when Google could declare “We’re not evil” without hundreds of thousands of shareholders to worry about, search engines were just search engines. Now, it appears, they’re not. Microsoft is calling Bing a decision engine, Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine, and Yahoo is… well, let’s not go there.

You could argue Microsoft’s position is born out of desperation. On whatever metric you chose to use, MSN Search (or Windows Live, I lost track of its names in the end) fell behind Google. Number of users, amount of money it made, brand awareness, effectiveness of the raw search – Google kept on winning.

And the fact remains that, if you place a couple of search terms in Bing and in Google, the top 10 search results Google throws up are, more likely than not, going to be more relevant. This is a very difficult thing to test (any pedants needn’t worry about telling me of my misuse of the word “fact” in this paragraph), but I think most people would agree with that assessment.

What’s clever about the Bing approach is that it reduces the importance of those first ten results. For anyone unfamiliar with Bing, I should say that it not only returns a top ten list but also provides a handy shortlist of terms down the left-hand side.

So, earlier I did a search for Windows 7 (the screenshot that sits atop this page). Scrolling down that list produces a number of Microsoft sites, the Wikipedia entry, a review site, a YouTube video and a couple of very techie sites. But the likelihood is that someone typing in “Windows 7″ wasn’t looking for that.

In fact, they were probably looking for the topmost of the suggested searches of “Download Windows 7″; press that link and it performes the search. And, right at the top sits a link to Microsoft’s download site for Windows 7.

That on its own is quite a nice improvement, but when you enter a hardware product it becomes even more impressive. Enter the term “Apple iPhone” into bing.com – not www.bing.co.uk, which is still some way behind its American cousin – and you’ll find a series of prepared searches specifically for that product – Manual, Repair (is that Microsoft having a dig, I wonder?), Games, Accessories, etc. It’s neat and, in terms of getting most people where they want to go quickly, I think it’s more successful most of the time.

I’ve argued this point in a past PC Pro podcast, and was met with thinly disguised disgust, but I suspect the vast majority of the UK population – and possibly even a number of PC Pro readers – would prefer this method of searching rather than having to think of the precise three search terms to find the site or article they’re looking for.

So, to answer the original question my headline poses, could this be enough to kill Google? It’s incredibly unlikely. If I was in charge at Google HQ, I’d respond quickly by setting up a very similar feature myself – however much it might gall me to copy Microsoft at anything to do with search. And if pride stops them from fighting back in this way, I believe they will lose market share, and fast.

Am I foolishly misguided? I’ll erect my barriers against the oncoming verbal assault… either way, I’d be interested to know what people think.