“I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.”

– Lauren from Microsoft’s new “Laptop Hunters” commercial

With Microsoft’s February share of the search market weighing in at a paltry 8.2 percent and declining, the company has gone to extraordinary lengths to reverse the public’s indifference to its search offering. It tried a loyalty program called Cashback–“We are ‘The Search That Pays You Back!’” It tried a rewards program called SearchPerks, as well–“Start earning tickets towards exciting prizes whenever you search the Web!” Neither seems to have done much good.

Now, as it prepares to rebrand its search engine under a new name–Kumo–Microsoft (MSFT) is redoubling its marketing efforts with more proven methods. The company has hired ad agency JWT to create an estimated $80 million to $100 million ad campaign covering TV, online, print and radio. “According to one person close the situation, the forthcoming campaign will be careful to not position ‘Kumo’ as a competitor to Yahoo or Google and instead cast it as a reimagined search engine that ups the game by yielding fewer but more-focused results,” reports Ad Age, adding that such a strategy “is probably a good–if not the only–way to go.”

That said, if Kumo purports to be a “reimagined” search engine, it does seem to be lacking a bit in imagination. Certainly from what we’ve seen of it, Kumo doesn’t seem all that different from Google (GOOG). In fact, with its spartan design and goofy name, it arguably shares more similarities with the search sovereign than before. But then, perhaps, that’s the point. Perhaps what Microsoft is doing here is not reimagining Live Search as an entirely new game-changing service, but reimagining it as Google in hopes that we’ll forget its sad history as a failed Microsoft search product and reimagine it as a successful one.

“I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.”

– Lauren from Microsoft’s new “Laptop Hunters” commercial

With Microsoft’s February share of the search market weighing in at a paltry 8.2 percent and declining, the company has gone to extraordinary lengths to reverse the public’s indifference to its search offering. It tried a loyalty program called Cashback–“We are ‘The Search That Pays You Back!’” It tried a rewards program called SearchPerks, as well–“Start earning tickets towards exciting prizes whenever you search the Web!” Neither seems to have done much good.

Now, as it prepares to rebrand its search engine under a new name–Kumo–Microsoft (MSFT) is redoubling its marketing efforts with more proven methods. The company has hired ad agency JWT to create an estimated $80 million to $100 million ad campaign covering TV, online, print and radio. “According to one person close the situation, the forthcoming campaign will be careful to not position ‘Kumo’ as a competitor to Yahoo or Google and instead cast it as a reimagined search engine that ups the game by yielding fewer but more-focused results,” reports Ad Age, adding that such a strategy “is probably a good–if not the only–way to go.”

That said, if Kumo purports to be a “reimagined” search engine, it does seem to be lacking a bit in imagination. Certainly from what we’ve seen of it, Kumo doesn’t seem all that different from Google (GOOG). In fact, with its spartan design and goofy name, it arguably shares more similarities with the search sovereign than before. But then, perhaps, that’s the point. Perhaps what Microsoft is doing here is not reimagining Live Search as an entirely new game-changing service, but reimagining it as Google in hopes that we’ll forget its sad history as a failed Microsoft search product and reimagine it as a successful one.

Quite a gimmick, though Live Search Senior Director Frederick Savoye says SearchPerks, like Cashback, is actually part of Microsoft’s (MSFT) grand plan to “innovate the [search] business model.” If that’s so, the company might want to rethink it. Because Cashback really hasn’t done much to bolster Microsoft’s laggard search service, which remains a very distant third in the search market. According to Nielsen Online’s MegaView search ranking for August, searches on MSN/Windows Live declined 23.8 percent year-over-year. Its August 2008 share of the search market: 10.7 percent.

A 23.8 percent YoY fall in searches doesn’t seem like much of an innovation to the search business model. And with its search market share in decline, Microsoft clearly needs something more than a steady stream of gimmicks to stem the bleeding. Said Collins Stewart Internet analyst Sandeep Aggarwal: “Internal initiatives at [Microsoft] need time to lift off and prove their merit, but sooner or later the company will have to face the realities and decide again if a combination with [Yahoo] can speed the process.”