LiveSide - News blog : Live Search Club

Oh dear, there IS a Club Bing

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:20:48 GMT

Well the rebrand is thorough, we’ll say that. Live Search Club has been renamed to Club Bing, with the highly unfortunate url of www.clubbing.com (just please no baby seal games, mmmkay?). The “club”, basically a blatant attempt to drive up search share numbers (and ok, perhaps introduce Microsoft’s search to new users), captured as much as 2.6% of all US search share last summer according to numbers from Compete.com. For those of you worried about getting your fix of those crazy birds on Chicktionary (try backspacing sometime, it’s fun!), rest easy. According to an email sent out announcing Club Bing:

While you've been using Live Search, we've been behind the scenes working on something new called Bing™. We've even added the power of Bing to the Live Search Club, renaming it Club Bing. The first time you visit Club Bing you will need to enter your username and password again.

More Search numbers – Live Search Club quietly kicking a@#

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 23:49:09 GMT

The latest Compete.com numbers came out just before Christmas (Dec 23, for November), and while much of it is more of the same, a couple of interesting items caught our eye. It’s a little hard to get a gauge on any trends, as Compete changed some methodology in August, except to say that Google is still far and away the leader.

Compete has been separating out the numbers for Club Live from the Live Search numbers for some time. The set of games you play on Club Live, using Live Search as an aid, are certainly a blatant attempt to “game” the system, but what’s interesting is how much play Club Live is getting. As Jeremy Crane points out in his Compete blog post:

Club Live contributed 2.6ppts and nearly 300 million queries to MSN/Live. (To put things in perspective, Club Live gets more queries than either Ask or AOL.) Club Live continued to grow, with query volume up 3.4% versus the prior month and 7.2% for the year.

That Club Live gets more queries per month than either Ask.com or AOL is astounding, really. A fairly unscientific observation: people who are attracted to winning Club Live games might be interested in using Search to get deals of other kinds (think Live Search cashback), or at least that’s what Live Search seems to be counting on. Whether or not Club Live will make much of a difference in the long run remains to be seen, but anything that generates 300 million queries per month can’t hurt.

Live Search Perks – more rewards for using Live Search

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:48:00 GMT

It all started with Live Search Club, the somewhat maligned program to reward users for playing games using Live Search (and somewhat skewing search share counts, causing a bit of a scramble by Compete.com and others). Then last May Live Search introduced “cashback”, again rewarding users for using Live Search, this time in the form of rebates for products bought online.

Now, starting today and running through April 15, 2009, it’s Live Search Perks. By signing up and downloading a toolbar counter, users will be rewarded with “tickets” that can be redeemed for prizes at the end of the promotion, next April. Yes it’s US only, and yes you need to stay with the program for the entire period in order to redeem your tickets.

I talked with Frederick Savoye, a Senior Director at Live Search, about Search Perks and the broader search strategy. As part of “innovating in the business model”, Search Perks, built on the same platform that runs Live Search Club, has shown in tests to increase use of search threefold. “It really helps change people’s behavior”, said Savoy.

The toolbar counter only counts searches, and which search engine you are using, and does not collect any other information about your search habits, Savoy said. Searches conducted from Live Search or from MSN are eligible, although searches from Search and Give, Live Search Club, or MSN Video are not.

Users are awarded 500 “tickets” for signing up, and are awarded one ticket for each search conducted per day, up to a maximum of 25. While the fine print does say that “During the promotion there may be opportunities to receive additional tickets”, a quick calculation puts the maximum tickets available at about 5200, barely enough for a “big prize”, like an Xbox controller. Up to 250,000 participants will be allowed into the program, who must sign up before Dec 31, 2008.

Of course Live Search is going to have to do far more than this to make any headway against Google, and our prediction is that this is going to be seen as another desperate move in a search share war that many consider to be well over. But hey free stuff is free stuff.

Live Maps gets a new header and other Live Search news

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:59:59 GMT

Thanks to LiveSide member derviskemal for noticing that the Live Maps header has changed. Here’s the new look:

…and what we were seeing up until a few days ago:

Much more in keeping with the overall new look of Live Search. We wrote earlier about inconsistencies across Live Search properties, glad to see at least one of them is being fixed.

In another Live Search related story, Danny Sullivan had an interesting breakdown of the latest Compete numbers on search share in the US. While the overall numbers told the same old story, Compete took a new approach this month to Live Search Club.

Rather than either including the Live Search Club numbers along with Live Search (which skewed the search share numbers unfairly, some thought), or dropping them out entirely, which is what has been happening, this time Compete separated out Live Search Club but included it in the results as a separate category:

While the main purpose of Live Search Club is to play games and win prizes, and not search, it’s interesting to note that Live Search Club beats AOL search, and is nearly on par with Ask.com. Maybe there’s something to this Live Search Club business after all.

Search, Give, and share with “Live Search”

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 02:09:03 GMT

Some changes are beginning to pop with Live Search, up to including a possible new name and brand. Yesterday at SMX Advanced, Online Services President Kevin Johnson talked to Danny Sullivan for Search Engine Watch about branding. From the Associated Press:

Now that Microsoft has abandoned its $47.5 billion takeover bid for competitor Yahoo Inc., its marketing team is working on fixing Microsoft's search image to make it more competitive with Google Inc., Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services division said at a search advertising conference in Seattle hosted by the parent company of news site SearchEngineLand.com.

Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand, asked Johnson if he meant Microsoft wants to "change" its image in search instead of fix it.

"Fix means fix," Johnson replied. "If that means change, we'll change."

In recent weeks, Live Search has redone the Live.com home page, announced the “cashback” program, integrated Farecast.com into Live Search, updated Live Search for Mobile, pulled the plug on Live Search Books and Academic, revamped Live Search Club, completed a major deal with HP to pre-install a Live Search Toolbar on all new HP computers, starting next year, offered new webmaster tools and 404 redirects, and now today has announced two more bits of news.

The first, Search and Give is a program that donates money to charities when users use Live Search through a special web page:

By signing up at www.searchandgive.com, consumers can start donating one-cent to more than 100K schools and 900K non-profit organizations worldwide, every time they use the Internet to find whatever interests them – up to 500 searches permitted per person per month. People can also convert the tickets they’ve earned playing games on Microsoft’s Live Search Club, at www.club.live.com, into donations for those same schools or charities!

Available today at: www.searchandgive.com

and then Microsoft Research has just announced a beta of a pilot program called “SearchTogether”, which allows users to collaborate on searches. This collaboration helps in a number of ways, according to an announcement on the MSR page:

Awareness: The most valuable of the three. This is enabled by sharing group query histories and making them interactive, thereby reducing duplication. This process also can promote search learning, in which someone with rudimentary search skills can learn how to formulate more effective search queries by working with a person with more expertise. The ability to see other group members’ comments and ratings on specific search results also provides awareness about the group’s progress toward accomplishing their shared task.
Division of labor: SearchTogether integrates session-specific instant messaging into the search experience so that those working together on a search project don’t have to switch back and forth between a search client and Live Messenger to negotiate division of labor. Additionally, special collaborative query styles, such as “split searching,” provide automatic division of labor by partitioning a single set of search results among all team members. Sharing of queries and recommendations helps make the search effort productive.
Persistence: The group’s queries, comments, ratings, and chats are stored in a persistent search session, facilitating asynchronous communication and helping collaborators get up to speed.

Watch a video demo of SearchTogether

Download SearchTogether

Live Search Club revised with a new look

Kip Kniskern — Sat, 31 May 2008 22:15:00 GMT

Live Search Club, where you play games to win prizes by using Live Search (and in the process gaming Live Search’s share numbers), has recently updated to a new clean look:

While the market share analysts may not approve, Live Search Club has proven popular with at least a segment of the internet audience, while at the same time generating at least some controversy.

In somewhat related news, ads are starting to appear for Live Search cashback, the new rebate program announced at Advance08:

(via LiveSino.net)