Microsoft Aims Big Guns at Google, Asks Consumers to Rethink Search

Bing will have auto refining? I don't see how based on my definition of refining. A search is some number of bits as input, you can try to tease out more by performing computation or make guesses based on user search history. what you can't do is magic more bits into existence.

the beauty of google is that it approximates artificial intelligence. our primitive computation abilities could never figure out the relevance of pages based on crunching the actual contents of a page. but we're getting better on that end.

the future is probably halfway in between. relevance based on a combination of computation (think a more advanced wolfram alpha screening pagerank results).

I doubt bing has jumped ahead of both of these. throwing money at it won't change that.

The article assumes that $100 million is a large spend for a search engine launch, though a quick search on google points to Ask.com allocating $100 million to their 2007 ad campaign, and that didn't seem to do much for them. http://searchengineland.com/askcom-goes-weird-creepy-with-ne...

I couldn't find any official ask.com numbers.

"But Microsoft sees an opening on its own proprietary search data: 42% of searches require refinement, and 25% of clicks are the back button".

So does this happen with Google? Or to put it another way, does this campaign imply that it is too hard to fix the technical part so we are after the perception?