Search Engines Employ New Tactics to Gain Searchers - MSN and Yahoo try new tricks
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Since MSN is giving away nearly half a million dollars worth of prizes, both in primary and secondary drawings, you can bet they are indeed serious about shaking up the market. Coming on the heels of the announcement of its own pilot adCenter Program, which is similar to Google’s AdWords, yet claims to target advertisers with usage statistics and tracking information. MSN’s adCenter goes into full effect in June of this year, so the move to offer huge incentives to searchers may be only the beginning of MSN’s campaign to strengthen their share of the search market, and steal away searchers from both Google and Yahoo.
While search experts and users alike wonder about MSN’s motives for throwing such a huge promotion, we see an indication of what MSN is thinking from their blog: “…but when it comes down to it we have made a lot of improvements over the past year with our [algorithm] so people should notice a difference in relevance and a marketing campaign like MSN Search and Win is a good way to encourage people to try us again so they can see the improvements for themselves.
Yahoo began polling random Yahoo mail users in February, asking what incentives users would want for making Yahoo the primary search engine they use. Among the possible incentives offered were discounted NetFlix subscriptions, free music downloads, PC-to-phone calling credits, and even donations to the user’s charity of choice. While it is too early to tell if Yahoo plans to embark on this sort of campaign, many of the users polled would be agreeable to use Yahoo as their primary search engine in exchange for rewards, however the results of the poll are to be very confidential.
While MSN offers its chances to win to anyone, for Yahoo searchers, they would probably have to either install the Yahoo toolbar or login to search to be eligible for the incentives. A few people have commented that they are wary of the Yahoo toolbar, as it makes them feel that it is spyware, as well as an invasion into their private browsing habits. Other users have remarked that they felt that having to login in order to surf the web was too much of a hassle, nor do they feel comfortable surfing while logged in as it indicates tracking of sites that a user might visit online. Many searchers like the anonymity they feel they have when they utilize a search engine via HTTP versus a desktop search utility.
In response to the news that Yahoo may be considering gimmicks as well, Smith Barney says, “I'm not installing spyware for any reason, but as I DO NOT trust the hippie liberals controlling Google I'd happily switch to using yahoo movies to look up movies instead of imdb.com to save $7/month…”
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