Microsoft Still Needs Help Understanding Search - Buying Search Market Share
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The news was originally broken by John Batelle in his search blog, and later picked up by just about everyone. Microsoft's new program is called Microsoft Service Credits for Search. It's aimed at changing the search behavior of employees at large companies. Here's how it works: companies that sign up for the program earn a $25,000 enrollment credit that can be redeemed for Microsoft products and training. But that's just the beginning.
If the company promotes use of Microsoft Live Search, it can earn anywhere from $2 to $10 a user annually, depending on how much Microsoft's search engine is used. Batelle had a PowerPoint slide on his site that explained how it could work. It showed that a company with 10,000 PCs that did a lot of web searching could earn $120,000; a company with 50,000 PCs that didn't search the web quite as much could earn $200,000. Those numbers can add up very quickly.
So how does Microsoft know you're really with the program? Every computer at an enterprise participating in the program will have IE7 installed with a "Browser Helper Object." (I know, I couldn't help but imagine Clippy popping up and saying "It looks like you're doing a web search!" either). This lovely addition to IE7 will track search queries and send that information back to Microsoft. The tracker doesn't work with any other browser - not FireFox, not Opera, not even earlier versions of IE. According to the New York Times, Microsoft wants to sign up 30 companies, each with at least 5,000 computers, who are willing to install this software.
Microsoft is also hoping to convince enterprises to do the marketing for them by promoting the program internally to their staff. Some of the suggestions it has made for promoting it include in-house training sessions on how to improve your search skills (featuring Windows Live Search of course), setting the home page to Live Search, removing all other tool bars from the browser, and even having the CEO send a "message of encouragement" to the staff. Get them to sign up AND get them to do your marketing - talk about killing two birds with one stone!
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