Today Microsoft launched a campaign for Live Search with digital and print ads in major newspapers—New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times/PI, SF Chronicle, USA
Today— featuring its new capacities. You can tryout the future successor to MSN Search now, here. The campaign highlights the new mapping, local search and image search technology of Live, as well as targets some misunderstandings about the Live branding from the past year.
The Microsoft ad opens by quoting Battelle from The Search:
“Search is at best 5% solved–we’re not even in the double digits of its potential.”
By the demo that follows, in the digital copy, Microsoft is making a serious effort to push out beyond that five percent.
As the Live campaign copy states:
“Before we begin, let us state the obvious. We’re late to the game. We admit it. But instead of shrugging our shoulders and becoming a footnote in search history, we’ve decided to write a few new chapters.”
LiveSearch has made dramatic leaps during the past year
They are fully exploring the Web 2.0 potential of search.
But the Relevancy is just NOT there. They are now so concerned with filtering Spam and SEO tactics from their SERPs that they are many false positives – and many good relevant webpages have disappeared or lost their rankings.
Perhaps many of their users are casual surfers who just want to get the first valid result and be done with it –
It will take more than fancy AJAX and Mashups to defeat Google and Yahoo.
Unlike winning the browser wars – logistical strategies will not be as effective with the Search Engines wars