The Microsoft Bing ad campaign has started, and I love the ad’s creative and focus. In the early days of the web clutter was the biggest problem that Yahoo solved followed a few years later by Google.

Now in 2009 with online usage soaring to new levels with new user experiences, we have the same problem. Search is cluttered.  Search engine results are cluttered with SEO spam, real time tweets, blogs,  and other irrelevant clutter and noise.

Is Bing the answer? We’ll see. If Microsoft’s ad is any indication of their focus, then Bing has a legitimate shot at taking share of the market away from Google.

The new Bing ad is damn good. My wife Linda and I watched it last night, and we both agreed it’s excellent. Kudos to the ad firm for nailing the issue – CLUTTER.

Here is the Bing ad.

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt weights in via Danny Sullivan (search engine blogger who has followed search from day 1).

CEO Eric Schmidt has weighed in on the Bing launch — and he’s not sounding panicked, not that I would expect him to be. But he certainly puts out a conflicted message that Bing isn’t a serious competitor and yet argues that it’s serious enough that talk of a Google monopoly seems “unwarranted.” Plus, a somewhat passionate message that Microsoft can’t expect to buy its way into search share.

Schmidt: They’ve got a bunch of new ideas, and there are some things that are missing. We think that search is really about comprehensiveness, freshness, the scale and size of what we do, and it’s difficult for them to copy that.”

Is Google scared of this new threat on their market leadership?  Certainly the focus and positioning of Bing is relevant (pun intended).

Schmidt: We are spending all of our time on exactly what we’ve always done, which is innovation. I don’t think Bing’s arrival has changed what we’re doing. We are about search, we’re about making things enormously successful by virtue of innovation.

Question for Eric Schmidt: Can you be specific on the innovation part?

[To Learn More About SiliconAngle Blog]