Microsoft`s Search Bribery: a Brief Overview - Is it Working?
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The Live Search Cashback program made Microsoft "the laughingstock of the tech blogosphere," according to ReadWriteWeb. Honestly, any company that would pay for visitors to use their search engine must be pretty desperate, right? Desperate or not, it leaves you with one question: is it working?
Strangely enough, the answer might be yes...and no. ComScore showed that the program boosted Live Search's search volume by 15 percent a month after it began. But from July through September, Microsoft's share of the search market, according to Hitwise, remained pretty stable at about 5.5 percent.
A closer look at the numbers tells a more interesting story. If we look only at Cashback-related traffic, we see that it accounted for just under four percent of Live.com's traffic in mid-July. By mid-September, however, Cashback accounted for more than six percent of the search engine's traffic. Heather Dougherty, Hitwise's director of research, noted in a blog post about these figures that the increase in Cashback traffic "underscores the interest in the program, which is likely to be getting a boost from shoppers looking to save money and stretch their budgets, given the current economic climate."
Of course, thinking about shoppers trying to save money brings us to some fairly recent events that Microsoft would probably prefer to forget. To be exact, it brings us to Black Friday. Microsoft and Hewlett Packard engaged in some heavy promotion the week before, promising 40 percent refunds on everything in HP's online store. It's hard to pass up 40 percent off of a desktop or notebook computer. So many people tried to get the discount, in fact, that it caused a "significant spike in traffic" that "caused the system to go down for several hours," according to the Microsoft Live blog entry covering the incident.
The program stayed down for quite some time after the original traffic spike so that Microsoft could investigate the issue and then rebuild and redeploy the databases and indexes that support it. However, once it was working again, shoppers were in for a very unpleasant surprise: instead of getting the 40 percent discount as promised, shoppers were at least initially informed that they would be getting only three percent back. There is now a procedure in place to let Cashback users claim the 40 percent discount on qualifying Black Friday HP purchases, but the software giant lost a lot of trust in the debacle.
Next: Other Purchasing Ploys >>
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