Seattle — In a bid to boost its Web search traffic, having lately announced a cash rebate scheme to encourage Internet searchers to choose Windows Live Search over the competition, Microsoft on Monday signed a deal that will make its Live Search the default on Hewlett-Packard personal computers shipped in the U.S. and Canada, starting in January.
“A move designed to attract more users to Microsoft’s struggling search engine. Live Search follows both Google and Yahoo in the traffic it attracts.”
Ever since Microsoft withdrew its US$47.5 billion bid to buy search competitor Yahoo, the company has been under constant worry to prove it has a new plan for attracting more people to Live Search.
So far, HP computers were shipped with Yahoo as the default internet search engine. The deal is Microsoft’s latest attempt to take away at the dominance of search leader Google Inc. to enhance its presence in the search related advertising market.
The deal in addition asks for HP, the world’s largest PC maker, to pre-install copies of Internet Explorer with an extra Live Search toolbar on those computers. The Live Search toolbar that will be installed on HP computers will be built using Microsoft’s Silverlight Technology and will allow users to preview websites without leaving the web page they would be on. In addition to this, there will be shortcuts to some of HP’s web services, such as its Snapfish digital photo printing site.
“This is the most significant agreement with HP indicating our increased focus on securing broad-scale distribution for Live Search,” said Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division. “This is the most significant distribution deal for Live Search that Microsoft has ever done, and we are very pleased to be partnering with HP to help bring Live Search to millions of consumers across North America.”
HP shipped 3.9 million PCs in the United States in the first quarter of 2008, according to IDC. Spinning all HP PC consumers into Live Search users would be quite an accomplishment for Microsoft, but it is likely that many customers will change the default search engine to Google or Yahoo.
The software giant has revealed rising interest in the growing search related ads market, where Google is by far the biggest player. Microsoft Windows Live Search received 9.1% of the Internet searches conducted in the United States in April, according to Internet metrics firm ComScore. Google received 61.6% of U.S. searches during the same period.
The Microsoft-HP deal may increase usage of Live Search, and it is expected to have a more significant effect on Microsoft’s effort to make its Silverlight rich media technology, which competes with Adobe’s Flash and Flex, indispensable.
Microsoft did not reveal financial details of the deal or say how much additional search traffic it expects to gain to its millions of North American consumer customers.
“Search partnership deals have long been an area of contention between Microsoft and Google.”
However, Google struck a similar search partnership deal with Dell in 2006 that put its search software on Dell PCs, was thought to be worth $1bn over three years. It also struck a toolbar distribution deal with Adobe that year. Given Dell’s rivalry with HP, Microsoft’s decision to partner with HP appears to be motivated at least in part by the coziness between Google and Dell.
A Dell spokesman said the company has not decided if it will continue with Google after the current deal expires, but said it was “open to alternative” partnerships.
The agreement, which comes in to effect next January for new PCs in the United States and Canada, displaces a similar one HP has with Yahoo Inc. Microsoft said it expects the deal to make a large number of persons use its search engine.
“Wait for the turf war to continue.”