“Become a member of the Bing Rewards Preview and experience the benefits of doing what you love to do online — learning, discovering, exploring — while getting opportunities to earn credits toward great rewards”.
Participants have to download the Bing toolbar, to participate in the program.
This is Microsoft’s 2nd attempt to gain market share by “paying” people to use their search engine.
Back on 2008 Microsoft offered cash payment to people to use their Live.com search product.
I didn’t seem to move Live.com market share against Google very much or for very long.
How much market share will Bing.com gain from the rewards program?
Personally I don’t think its going to get them more than a 1-2% jump in share.
Mostly I think they are going to wind up simply rewarding people who are already using bing.com.
What do you think?
Will you switch search engines for the rewards?
Heh, the Bing Bar only works with Internet Explorer. So they’re paying you to use Bing AND switch browsers 🙂
I actually think this is a good marketing idea though. The idea is to get people to try out the search engine. It’s enough to get many people to try it. Once you get into that habit you’re less likely to switch back to Google.
Andrew
Good catch.
Further reason to believe 80%-90% of the people they will be rewarding are already their customers
someone should tell bill gates about the internets since he doesn’t seem to understand them.
FREE domains from Microsoft via PNRP – Peer-Name-Resolution-Protocol ?
Eh, personally, I’m not really interested in this new toolbar. I used bing when they had their 8% cashback. That was a great feature I wish they’d bring back – I heavily buy and sell on ebay – and it was a great bonus… The toolbar just doesnt cut it for me… Google is the only tool I use.
it can’t increase so much the Bing market share because all SE users always prefer to have GOOD search results WITHOUT any “prize” rather than LESS GOOD search results only to take a small “prize”
there are many better ways to compete with Google but MS seems hasn’t any new idea
.
believe it or not, but, 16 months ago, when the (just rumored) Microsoft’s new search engine was expected to be called “Kumo”, I’ve suggested to MS (posting my idea also on several, MS and non-MS, IT forums and blogs) the right way to (try to) compete with Google…
new
goos.blogs
pot.com/2009/08/new.html
but MS (of course, IF someone inside MS has read my article) hasn’t listen my (rational) suggestion and called it “Bing”
what do you think about my idea?
.
Personally I like Bing.com better than kumo but Live.com was fine as well
For a search engine its technology performance and proper search results and a better user experience that will win the long term business
in my article I haven’t suggested to use Kumo.com but Microsoft.com to host the new SE
Same answer
It sounds like a cherry to me.
first of all you do not need bing. and with ie 9 when you use the browser all you get below your search term is use microsofts suggestions and it never goes away.i do not need suggestions from google ,bing ,facebook or any other entity. i know what i want to type and will without any idiot putting terms, suggestions or totally unrelated words coercied into my browser.
what you are seeing is mulitfacted companies taking control of the users experience. and this is exactly what frank said several yrs ago the browser is the threat to domainers.
I will try it for the education and because Bing ranks my sites 🙂
you’d have to pay me hard cash to switch back to IE, i’m a FF lover.
I would love to know how much the Live.com cash back offer cost MSFT, anyone ?
“Same answer”
“Bing” sounds better but “Microsoft” (like Google, Apple, etc.) was/is already well known wordwide
.
How bad does a search engine need to be that people have to be paid to use it?