Microsoft’s strategy to gain more searches
Posted by Katia Pereria on 24 Jul 2007 at 11:06 am | Tagged as: Search Engine News
With Microsoft’s recent launch of Vista, many people were anticipating a revival of MSNs presence in Search. Vista is still young, but there have been some significant increases in searches coming from Live Search over the last couple months.
According to Compete, MSN / Windows Live Search have posted a dramatic rise since last month and Google has dropped to 62.7 percent, down from a high of 67.0 percent globally (Google still dominates the UK search landscape). This is said to be due to the advent of the Windows Live Search club and the fact that you have to use Live Search to gain points. The aim is that you play games for points which you can redeem for Microsoft products. All of the games involve using Live’s search engine to get the points; you have to search with Live only. I think it’s sneaky but appears to be working at first glance.
This concept started as a seedling planted in December 2005 by the master of Microsoft Bill Gates. He came up with the concept of giveaways and revenue-sharing to win searchers. The idea was to win over searches with cash or free content and software.
“We’ll actually go to users and say instead of us keeping all that ad revenue, we’ll actually share some of it back with the user,” said Mr. Gates, according to a transcript supplied by Microsoft. “The user essentially will get paid, either money or free content or software things that they wouldn’t get if they didn’t use that search engine.”
The idea is not bad but from experience and analysing past trends; giveaways rarely work so it will be interesting to see how this pans out over the coming months.
Vista is still in its early days, so in order to maintain this trend; Live Search is going to have to keep working hard at keeping the searchers interested beyond the Freebees. In March this year, Danny Sullivan spoke about Live Search leveling off and even growing a bit. Live Search Club appears to be doing so well. The progression is gradual but it does look like things are looking up for Microsoft. Microsoft should hope these stats keep showing a favorable climb in Searches for a few more months before the public can say for certain that they are on their way back up.
