After the success of its advertising campaign against Apple, Microsoft has launched something similar against the search outfit Google. Microsoft scored advertising points with its campaign which pointed out to the world, plus dog, that Apple was really expensive for what you get. Now Redmond is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market.

Normal budgets for a US advertising campaign are half that figure. Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft is a big spender with this $100 million just shy of a third of its budget last year.

Sources in the advertising industry do not think that the ads won't go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. What they will say is that search engines don't work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search solves their problems. In other words they will be using the same strategy they used against Apple. In this case they are saying you can get a better search without having to refine the data.

However that approach did not work for Ask.com which was arguably an easier to use search tool than Google and has only managed to capture a fraction of the market. Still if you chuck enough cash at something you can convince enough people of anything. Even voting for certain presidents of dubious intelligence.