Is Live Search Earning Your Loyalty?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

MSN Live Search posted on its blog a few days ago that it wants to earn your loyalty. One of the ways that Live Search is planning to do that is to bribe you with perks for using their search engine. Is this a good business plan?

There have been other search engines try offer such incentives for using them. Remember BigDaddy?

It didn’t work. Now BigDaddy is using the kids. Ho hum.

Well, MSN Live Search started out with a bit more clout than BigDaddy in the first place. Do you think it will work for them? I say likely not.

The reason I don’t think so is Google. We saw Google rise to prominence by just being good, not by offering incentives. When people want to find useful information, they want a search engine that will return quality results. They don’t want one that will return inferior results and offer something else of a little value. I might like the perk, but if I want information then I want the information I’m looking for.

MSN Live Search may be using the incentives program to boost its revenues. If that’s the case and it works then it could be a useful business model. But they won’t buy my loyalty.