Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Microsoft Live Search had a massive 30% jump in traffic in May compared to April, while Yahoo and Google lost ground month to month.

Google still reported a year-to-year surge of 15% while Yahoo fell about the same amount. Live Search, however, increased its traffic from 2007 70%.

Live Search Cashback launched with eleven days left to go in May. Is this enough to create the kind of surge that would explain Live’s hefty numbers? The solution to the problem may come in taking a look at Live Search Cashback’s number one competitor, Amazon, and seeing how they did the same month.

I have used Live Search Cashback and I actually enjoyed the experience quite a bit. I was looking for a camera on there and found a price $25 better than I found on Amazon.

However, I went back a week later to buy it, and Amazon had cut their price for the camera by $40, so I went with them. Taking a look at other electronic equipment, it was often just a little bit less expensive on Amazon, as if they saw LSC as a threat and chose to undercut the Microsoft price. I know for a fact they did it with my camera.

My experience with LSC was that I used the service, enjoyed it, bookmarked it, but bought through Amazon. Perhaps more importantly, I found no correlation between using LSC and then using Live Search for normal, day-to-day search engine use. The Cashback interface only searches for items to buy, and there’s a tiny link in the upper-left corner for regular Live Search.

Of course, most of the money in search engines comes from people searching for items to buy, and advertisers can be confident that when using the Live Search interface, customers are bombarded with absolutely nothing but products.

If Microsoft can become the number one shopping search engine, then they’ve done a big thing. But they’re not about to replace Google in that search bar at the top of your browser because of Live Search Cashback.

Thanks to Dan Frommer at SAI for the info.

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