This is cool and all, but instead of spending money on this project why not try to improve their search engine or just not spend this money since bing loses so much money. I don't mind waiting half a second extra for my search results. It seems more like their thinking is we got a lot of engineers we are paying a bunch of money to lets do some project.
This move saves money, since the servers process queries more efficiently-- “Right off the bat we can chop the number of servers that we use in half,” Burger says.
"Just improving their search engine" isn't some simple task. Google has a head-start measured in thousands of man-years. Closing that gap takes a great number of smart people a great amount of time.
I assume that Google is improving slower than Bing, since their algorithms and systems are more mature and closer to the "asymptotically ideal search engine".
I think this project was funded not only because it helps Bing, but it also accelerates pretty much any large-scale data center application. So in theory, this system could help applications that do not exist yet.
