May 22, 2008 | Thursday
Microsoft cashback search scheme: Desperate or brilliant?
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in News |Online Sales |PPC |Search Engines |Google |Microsoft
According to at least one pundit, it’s both.
Michael Arrington, editor of Techcrunch, writes:
This new approach is both desperate and brilliant. Desperate because Microsoft is giving away most of the search revenue to get market share gains. Brilliant because they have such a small share of search revenue today that they have little to lose, and they are hitting Google hard in their core business.
On this side of the pond, Danny Sullivan points out that Microsoft is merely taking Google’s lead on this one. His verdict after testing the new scheme? It’s not ready for prime time. Sullivan says that Microsoft [seems] to have abandoned relevancy when it comes to product research seaching. Ouch. Further:
This isn’t a way to win over consumers. This is a bad experience. In hopes of saving money, I’m wasting a lot of time and getting a bad impression of a search site that wants to woo me. Oh, and not saving money either. I’m sure things will improve, and there’s potential in the model. But it has to be much simpler than this.
From my perspective, it will take more than this to begin to take significant market share from Google. Microsoft might find its attention and resources better focused on improving its algorithms, innovating on the technology, and simply making it easier and faster to search with them than with any other engine.
The advantage of having as much money as MSFT does is that you can throw money at problems. But you’ve still got to throw it at the right problems.
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