Ballmer Says Microsoft Ready To Spend On Search

Speaking at the Executives' Club of Chicago, Ballmer acknowledged that Microsoft got a late start in search but plans to what's necessary to make its Bing search engine a more effective means of finding information online.

"In our industry, the No. 1 mistake that people make is that they quit too early," Ballmer said in the speech, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. "If you look back at any great technology business, it took a while to build up."

Microsoft's Bing search engine has had a solid first two weeks. In the week prior to Bing's June 1 launch, Microsoft had 9.1 percent of Internet searches in the U.S., but that number jumped to 12.1 during the week of June 8-12, according to ComScore.

It's too early to account for the novelty factor in these numbers, but the technology underpinning Bing is unique from that of Google, which suggests Microsoft will continue to gain ground as an alternative go-to search engine.

Microsoft is reportedly spending $90 million to advertise Bing, and the initial campaign spots have focused on the idea of "search overload" -- the deluge of unrelated results that are often returned with keyword searches -- as well as the inefficiency of Google's keyword-based search technology.

Microsoft is aware that Google will be tough to topple in search, but Yahoo represents a much more attainable conquest. In ComScore's May search market figures, Google had about 65 percent of U.S. Web searches and Yahoo had 20.1 percent. Leapfrogging Yahoo for the number two spot in search would be a major feather in Microsoft's cap as well as justification for further search technology investments.