New York — Attempting to invigorate its less fruitful services, Microsoft lately announced that it has merged its Live Search Cashback into its shopping vertical search engine Live Search Products to garner a more useful and meaningful product search tool for users into a single experience. According to the Official Live Search Blog, the unified product search tool now allows users to easily research, compare products and most importantly save money.
Combining the two Live Search sub-products vertical is a natural fit which makes availing cashback a natural part of online search, shopping, and research. In addition to bringing cashback to Products, also brought about some enhancements particularly on search results relevance, and the overall site performance.
There are quite a few enhancements that is now visible as we have combined these two interfaces. We have also improved relevance and site performance as we have migrated from the legacy Jellyfish technology (the social shopping site that Microsoft purchased in 2007) to the Live Search platform.
The Live Search Cashback program, which Microsoft launched last year, gives users monetary incentives to click through and buy products from the ads they are shown. It was controversial since the move to gain market share from Google was so drastic and seemingly desperate.
Other enhancements to the Live Search Products include, product reviews, opinion rankings, product browsing by feature and product sorting by ratings.
It is also worth acknowledging that “Opinion Ranking” is a collection of product reviews pulled together from the web by Live Search Products. These become the basis for the Live Search Products ratings.
The company introduced the Cashback program nearly a year ago in an attempt to boost its overall slice of the search market as well as within the lucrative commerce segment.
However, the move also indicates the fact that on the rewarding front, Cashback program did not have much of an effect on Microsoft’s search, with its market-share initially raised up before hovering around 9% (which is what it was before the program), and Google’s share remaining at nearly 62%.
Microsoft’s Live Search name has gone through several re-branding efforts of its search site in the effort to keep up with the search capacities of Yahoo and Google. The present changes to the product search feature comes ahead of a broader revamp of Live Search due later this year. Microsoft is presently experimenting with the new search, code-named Kumo, with its own employees.
If you wish to reap the benefits of Cashback for getting some stuff online, you may want to check out the new Live Search Products here.