This week Microsoft is expected to announce the launch of a new search engine called Bing, which will be supported by an $80 to $100 million advertising campaign. The substantial budget denotes how determined Microsoft is to turn around its position in the perhaps still nascent (growing annually around 15%) search engine market.

Google Search has continually consolidated its hold in the market while also extending its distance from its closest competitors, Yahoo! Search and MSN/Windows Live Search.

Microsoft’s new search engine is aiming to deliver value to users where existing most search engines fail. A memo from Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s SVP in charge of search, nicely sums up what may be an opportunity in the search engine service market:

In spite of the progress made by search engines, 40% of queries go unanswered;40% of queries go unanswered; half of queries are about searchers returning to previous tasks; and 46% of search sessions are longer than 20 minutes… We believe we can provide a better and more useful search experience…

Will Bing deliver on this promise? The new search engine is supposed to deliver semantic category groups along with hits, thereby offering more tailored results towards what users are looking for. Will it effect a major change in the search engine market? It seems that time and $80 million will tell.

This weekend Google is launching its first television commerical aimed solely at raising awareness for Chrome, the internet browser it released last year which currently has a 1.42% worldwide market share according to Net Applications.  The browser market is basically dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) but perhaps change is in the air. Before 2007 Internet Explorer had a worldwide usage market share over 80%; today it is at about 66%. The most significant competition to IE has come from Mozilla Firefox which grew to a 15% share within two years of its release and currently stands at 22%. Apple’s Safari has also made some headway and is currently has an 8% share.

It will be interesting to see if the television campaign helps Chrome’s market share and in general how it fares during the next year. Will it reach 7% like Firefox did?

Nielsen Online released this press release yesterday detailing the search market in March 2009.

The results are 16% greater than last March, at 9.5 billion in total searches. It also seems that the market is somewhat consolidating. More search activity has gone to Google, while about less searches are going to other search engines. This is especially outside the top 5 (Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Windows Live Search, AOL and Ask.com); in the category listed as other, denoting these minor search engines, share dropped from 7.3 to 3.8%.

Other than Google only one engine demonstrated share growth: Micrososft (MSN/Microsoft Live Search), growing from a 9.3 to a 10.3% share.