Jimmie Fallon is comedically spineless, and has the moral ethos of a timid paramecium. So the news that he’ll be shilling on his new show for Bing, Microsoft’s umpteenth attempt to get into the search game, won’t besmirch his persona.

From the NYT:

[T]he segments on “Late Show” will present Mr. Fallon as a quiz master, asking contestants to use bing.com to search for answers to questions in categories like travel, health and shopping.

“ ‘Bing’ sounds like a Jimmy Fallon word,” Mr. Silverman said, laughing. “The alignment is great.”

In this way, Bing is the new Garden Weasel.

What will be interesting to watch from here on in is how NBC (and Fallon’s creator and puppetmaster, Lorne Michaels) will handle a name host whom they have essentially formed out of clay, and who will obviously do whatever he is told.

These days, 10 or 20 years in the life of a modern media franchise is unimaginable. But in theory, when Conan O’Brien* finishes his time on the Tonight Show there will be an even more pliable shell waiting in the wings—one who makes the pliable Jay Leno** seem difficult.

Since Bing is owned by Microsoft, Fallon probably won’t suffer the same fate as Whoopi Goldberg, a star with similarly high standards in her commercial affiliations, who jumped into bed a while back with another one of those newfangled internets companies and brought home a little problem. (If you’ll recall, she was suddenly the ubitquitous spokesperson for a misbegotten outfit called Flooz.com, which ended up screwing a lot of its customers out of their money when it shut down abruptly.)

As for Bing—Microsoft’s last search gambit, you will recall, involved paying people to use it. (This was the euphoniously named, oddly unsuccessful “Live Search Cashback.”)

The only problem with that was that M’soft couldn’t get advertisers on the thing. After chatting with Steve Ballmer on the subject, one reporter in all seriousness speculated that he was considering paying advertisers to support the idea as well.

At the time, Hitsville contended that the only way to improve on this innovative business model would be if Microsoft also just bought the companies’ products and gave them to consumers, thereby guaranteeing the ads’ success.

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* Has O’Brien been funny yet in his new show? After presidential-transition-level coverge in the Times, it was hard not to be at least curious. But I’ve seen only tepid laughs, flop sweat, and O’Brien’s inability to stop hitting the desk top, the thumps from which echo uncomfortably into his mike.

Sample line: Joan Rivers is trying to sell her NYC apartment for $25 million. “It sounds high, but knowing Joan Rivers, it’s probably had a lot of work done.” The audience laughed tepidly, but O’Brien didn’t blink: He followed that up with a Larry King joke.

** Speaking of hacks, Neil Strauss does a blowjob interview with Jay Leno in the newest Rolling Stone. (There’s a short excerpt here; RS doesn’t generally put whole features online.) The departure of Leno from late night would be a nice moment to reflect on a guy who after 17 years on the job will leave no footprints—a colorless gladhander, a host simulacrum. Carson held him in contempt, as does, patently, David Letterman. But Strauss, no doubt looking for a new ghostwriting gig, doesn’t ask Leno anything remotely challenging.