Microsoft's Big Search Gambit

One of Google's (GOOG) most remarkable accomplishments is, undoubtedly, figuring out how to dominate the world of search without advertising its services. In an ad-saturated era, the company that built its fortune by being the world's greatest advertising vehicle did so without buying commercials or billboards or Web banners. It simply built the greatest search engine in history and let word-of-mouth spread the news.

But that was back in the Bronze Age of 2001, when search was in its infancy. Now, argues Advertising Age reporter Abbey Klaassen, search engines are much closer to one another in quality. It no longer goes without saying that Google's search performance is head-and-shoulders above Yahoo (YHOO) or Microsoft (MSFT). In this era, where performance is mostly the same, the brand matters. And no one knows this better than Google. According to Klaassen's report, Google recently had consumers use its search engine under a different name, use a rival search engine that was labeled with the Google logo, and compared their responses. Time and again, consumers preferred the search engine they thought was Google's, regardless of how it performed.

That, Klaassen reports, is one of the reasons why Microsoft is about to launch a $100 million ad campaign slamming Google and promoting its new search engine. Google won't be mentioned by name; that would be a little gauche, apparently. Instead, viewers and readers will be pointedly asked if they are satisfied with "search" as they use it in their daily lives and humbly offered a better alternative: the latest generation of Microsoft's search engine, dubbed Bing. Microsoft's ad gurus plan to model the campaign after the iPhone; consumers didn't know what an iPhone could do but once the commercials stopped rolling, they knew they couldn't live without one.

Now, $100 million is nothing to sneeze at; it's four times what Google spends in advertising every year, and most of that cash is aimed at recruiting talent, not hawking its services to the general public. But will it work? PC World's Ian Paul sums up Microsoft's challenge rather succinctly: "Microsoft must dislodge the idea from the public consciousness that the name Google is synonymous with Internet search." And that's assuming Bing is anything to write home about. The new search engine is reportedly about to be unveiled at this week's All Things D conference. Microsoft has to convince the world's experts that it's just done something truly extraordinary in search. Then it has to convince the rest of the world. It's reportedly committed $100 million to the task; we'll see how it goes.