October 1, 2008 by Matt Thomas
Live Search has fired a warning shot at Google by enhancing its policy of offering fringe benefits to users. Today the Microsoft search engine launched Live Search Perks, a promotion whereby users are rewarded with “tickets” depending on how much they use Live Search. The tickets can then be exchanged for prizes when the promotion ends on April the 15th next year.
Live Search Perks is a continuation of a longstanding policy that began with “Live Search Club,” an unpopular program that gave benefits to people playing games using Live Search, and continued last May with “Cashback,” which offered users a percentage of the money spent online back.
Senior Director at Live Search, Frederick Savoy is bullish about the initiative’s chances of success, claiming that this type of search incentive scheme has been shown to increase the use of a search engine threefold, and stating that, “It really helps to change people’s behaviour.”
Interestingly, considering the current vogue for collecting user information, the Search Perks toolbar, that you have to download to take part in the offer, does not collect any information about your search habits. The only data recorded is the number of searches and which search engine you are using (you can use either Live Search or MSN).
Prizes range from air miles to Xbox controllers, though questions have been raised about the number of tickets required to win these prizes. Users are rewarded with 500 tickets for signing up and an additional ticket for every search, up to 25 a day. This puts the maximum amount of tickets accruable by April at around 5200 barely enough for some of the bigger prizes. Live Search have however stated that additional tickets may be available as the program goes forward.
At the moment Live Search Perks is only available in the US, though it will serve as an interesting test case. Whether it succeeds or not the online community will be taking notice of this new strategy to unseat Google from their position of dominance.
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