Along with the rebranding comes a reported $80 million advertising campaign spanning TV, radio, print and online, created by New York’s JWT advertising agency. The ads will try to convince consumers that although they may be happy with their current search engine (i.e. Google), they don’t know how good the experience could be.

How Microsoft plans to migrate its current users to the new domain remains to be seen. Certainly they will lose some of their users in the switch, but we think the move makes a ton of sense. Here’s why:

The Live brand doesn’t work for search

There are myriad problems with live.com as a search brand, but most significant is the sheer impossibility of using Live as a verb. Although Google is also not a verb, it can be used as one: “just Google it.” Bing too is not a verb, but like Google it has no real definition, and so Microsoft won’t have a tough time appropriating it for their engine.

Microsoft already uses Live for other products

XBOX Live, Windows Live, and MSN Live Spaces are just a few of the brands under the Microsoft umbrella that use the Live brand. This makes it hard to talk about the search engine disctinctly, without calling it “Live Search.” Not only is Live Search not a particularly catchy or memorable brand, Microsoft doesn’t own LiveSearch.com. In fact the site is merely a parked domain showing Google Ads, so an $80 million dollar campaign to push “Live Search” would have the effect of driving money and users to Google.

Also, as Danny Sullivan recently pointed out, there’s no confusion that Google is a search company, but Live Search is easy to miss amongst the sea of products in the Microsoft portfolio. By giving their search engine a distinct brand like Bing Microsoft enables it to take on a life of its own.

Bing is a good brand

Bing is catchy, and reminds me of a slot machine. Its also not hard to imagine an advertising campaign based around the name, and if executed properly it could become a catchphrase. There’s no confusion about how to spell it, even to non-English speakers, and its a very short .com.

Bing’s Impact on SEO

We’re keenly interested in how Bing changes the search landscape, and the search engine optimization business. The thing we like most about SEO is that its a moving target, and a new competitor in the search space will certainly shake things up. We’ve yet to see what Microsoft has planned, but we’re expecting new vertical search opportunities and an emphasis on immediate answers.

Do you like Microsoft’s new brand? Do you think it will help Microsoft catch-up to Google and Yahoo, or is Google uncatchable? Let us know in the comments.

Futher Discussion: Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, PaidContent

The ads promote 3 services that we’ve seen so far:

1. Tweetie, a Twitter client for iPhone
2. Twittervision, a mashup showing live tweets on a Google map thats been around for quite a while
3. Exec Tweets, a new directory and tweet aggregator of selected business executives

The third site, ExecTweets, is the most interesting in terms of Twitter’s business model. Its a new site created by John Battelle’s Federated Media and sponsored by Microsoft. It aggregates tweets from the leaders of big brand companies like eBay, digg, and Zappos, with a user voting system built in to help prioritize the stream.

Its a great fit, as Mr. Battelle has been teaching us about conversational marketing for some time and defending Twitter’s value before everyone else seemed to get it. Federated Media sells ad inventory for sites popular with the early adopter crowd such as TechCrunch, digg, and boingboing, so they should know how to market to Twitter’s current audience. We haven’t been able to find any details as to whom is paying whom for what, but its safe to assume that the privilege did not come cheaply.

One thing that is sure to raise some eyebrows amongst the SEO community is that the ad links are dofollowed (i.e. not nofollowed). The ads are embedded in the site’s HTML, not loaded by external Javascript files, so they will be indexed by search engine crawlers. Considering the enormous domain authority of Twitter and the fact that nearly every other external link on twitter.com is nofollowed, these links could pass a lot of PageRank.

More coverage of the new partnership can be found on the official Twitter blog, Battelle Media, and Venture Beat.

Do you have a Twitter account? Follow the official Illuminati Karate (@ill_k) twitter stream for industry news and tips on web development and search engine optimization.

Expression Web SuperPreview lets you view your website in IE6, IE7, IE8 and any other web browser you have installed, and switch between them as you please. That means you can switch between viewing your website in Shiretoko (Firefox 3.5 beta), Internet Explorer 6, and the Safari 4 beta with the click of an icon. You can even compare them side by side. Perhaps the coolest feature is that you can overlay the different renderings on top of each other in an onion-skin mode, allowing you to fully appreciate the Cuil-like approach IE6 takes to rendering webpages.

SuperPreview also includes a CSS inspector, DOM inspector, rulers, guides, and other such functionality we’ve come to love from Firebug and other great Firefox web development plugins.

For the time being, SuperPreview is released as a free (as in beer) beta, which you can download from here (250 MB). It will eventually be part of Expression Web 3, which probably means it will not remain free, so make sure to get the beta now.

For more information, check out the original MSDN Post, and this fantastic writeup from istartedsomething.com.

H/T: HackerNews