It appears that the new search engine from Microsoft won’t be called Kumo after all as the company prepares to unveil a marketing blitz behind the engine which could potentially change search engine optimization (SEO).
AdAge reports that Microsoft will spend between $80 million and $100 million on advertising for its new search engine, which the magazine says will be called Bing. According to the magazine, this marketing campaign will dwarf anything that search engine giant Google has done in the past.
However, if Microsoft is to truly rival Google, it has a big hill to climb as a recent report from comScore found that the company only had an 8.2 percent market share in search. To change this, some say Bing will need to show people that search can be improved.
"If you grab the average user off the street and ask them, ‘Does search suck?’ I think they’d say no. They don’t know what else can be done," Shashi Seth, a former executive at Google who is now chief revenue officer at Cooliris told the magazine. "They think search does a pretty good job, and if you could prove otherwise with a product that’s differentiated, people will sit up and take notice."
In recent weeks Google appears to be facing an onslaught of competition from upstart search engines. But with comScore reporting that Google maintained a 64.2 percent market share last month, it’s unlikely the company will be knocked from the top spot anytime soon.
