In an article today in AdAge, Microsoft is aiming it’s guns at Google, launching a campaign, somewhere in between $ 80 and 100 millions. Microsoft has tried a lot of tricks, almost everybody in the book, to grab a bigger market share in the search business. The results don’t match the efforts! Microsoft’s search query share keeps declining. In order to jump-start its search business, Microsoft attempted to buy Yahoo, but fail. It had bought a search startup, called Powerset, and is trying to build a whole different experience that will allow it to win market share.
A lot of people will argue that no amount of advertising Microsoft throws at the product will make a difference – the quality of search results is the only thing that matters. And that may have once been true; after all, Google built its brand on the back of a great user experience, results that were markedly better and zero ad support.