Microsoft sent out an email to its Hotmail users this week to see if they’d play along in their “Live Search Trial Program.” The program rewards users with “tickets” every time the users search for something (and find it) with Live Search. These tickets then can be later redeemed for t-shirts, video game consoles, and other various prizes.
My wife has actually been taking part in part this promotion for a while. The same promotion, or what appears to be the same promotion, appears to have been previously limited to a few word games that function on assisted Live search. Now, it has obviously been expanded in scope. One has to wonder about the usefulness of a search protocol if a company must pay its users every time they find what they want.
Still, it’s clear that Microsoft is proud about what they’ve done to upgrade Live Search, even if the rest of us can’t really tell a significant advantage it offers us over competition. If my personal userlogs are any indication of what is going on in the rest of the wilds of the ‘net, then Live Search is still in a highly competitive race to finish a distand second from Google.
[via Ars Technica]
User comment: By: sen2designGoogle has create its own domain in most of the surfers mind, Most of us type "http://www.google.com" on the browser to see if there is a net connection. I don't think facebook and myspace will be a good search model...as everyone on the net needs a quick result to show up...rather then login and then looking around there. Google really works much better.
User comment: By: SiddharthGoogle replaced the old style searching by its content searching but now the net has gone a little further where we need more targeted and contextual search results which only face book and my space kind of sites provide and the hit rate for those kind of search results will be much more compared to search results by Google. So wait and see how Google will fall with a year or so in its search field, also i like the live.com search and i participate there too, not because i like Microsoft but there should be healthy competition so that we can get much better search sites in future... spare Google for sometime...
[...] Microsoft ha probado suerte con sus usuarios de Hotmail enviándoles un correo y invitándoles esta semana a un programa llamado "Live Search Trial Program."… el programa recompensa a los usuarios que realicen búsquedas en Live Search "y en encuentren algo y hagan click en el enlace", ganando de esta manera tickets que se pueden canjear con camisas, video consolas y otros premios. [...]
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Visit here to subscribe to these commentsUser comment: By: meI tried that promo a little. Used Google instead to find whatever was needed to solve the thing. Worked much better! :D