RSSMicrosoft Search Share Up Thanks to 'Chicktionary'
By Nate Mook | Published July 18, 2007, 12:12 PM
After months of diminishing market share in the search industry, Microsoft may have found the answer to competing against Google and Yahoo: Chicktionary. The addictive game, which is available on the Live Search Club site, rewards users with prizes such as software.
Microsoft's troubles in the search market date back many years. The company previously utilized Google and Yahoo to handle its search results, not launching its own engine until late 2004. At the time, Microsoft said it would put forth considerable effort and resources to regain ground on its competitors and boost its search share above 9.5%.
Two and a half years later, the picture hasn't improved very much for the Redmond company. Search queries performed on MSN fell from 16.3 percent in February 2005 to 13.5 in February of this year, according to Internet metrics firm comScore. That number dropped even farther in April, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which put Microsoft's search share at a mere 9 percent.
comScore put MSN and Windows Live Search queries at just over 10 percent of the market in May, a distant third behind Google and Yahoo. Microsoft also saw the departure of its Windows Live Search chief, Christopher Payne, and a reorganization of the division.
But things are beginning to look up, if June numbers from comScore are to be believed. According to the firm, Microsoft gained a whopping 3 percent in search share for the month, while both Yahoo and Google dropped a percentage point.
Another Internet metrics company, Compete, said the share of MSN and Windows Live searches jumped from 8.4% in May to 13.2% in June, an increase of 67%. While Nielsen/NetRatings will surely offer a third set of numbers, the trend is clear: Microsoft is finally seeing a change of fortune in the search industry.
Or is it? According to both comScore and Compete, Microsoft's turnaround is not due to improved quality or customer satisfaction with the service, but rather an online game called "Chicktionary." The chicken-themed game lets users re-arrange letters into words, and then launches a Web search for the word. A player may indirectly run dozens of searches in a single game.
Chicktionary is available on Microsoft's Live Search Club Web site, which offers other games such as a crossword puzzle called Flexicon, which also requires searches to be made for each word. Prizes are what's apparently attracting users to the site. For each game they play, visitors earn points that can be redeemed for software like Windows Vista and Zoo Tycoon 2, as well as shirts, song downloads, headphones and more.
The effort seems to be working, at least for now. According to Compete, Live Search Club saw almost no traffic in April and 330,000 unique visitors in May. In June, the site garnered nearly 3 million unique visitors. If the numbers hold up, Microsoft has gained significant ground on Yahoo, which holds just over 19% of the search market. comScore, however, puts Yahoo's share at over 26%.
The question, of course, is whether the traffic will hold up. If users get tired of playing games and making searches for prizes -- something that has been attempted by a number of search upstarts who typically see only a brief surge in traffic -- Microsoft's search share could quickly fall back to below 10%.
"If Microsoft can actually leverage this traffic to club.live.com into actual search users and string together a few more months like this, they could really threaten Google’s top spot," remarked Compete analyst Steve Willis.
Too bad all the cheating idiots have killed it. Using bots and ordering 100 Zunes and 500 copies of Vista, like Microsoft wasn't going to catch that. Every time a good thing comes along the greedy morons have to ruin it.
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|I agree live search needs to get better to actually compete with google. Heck when I was playing flexicon the puzzle game, I had to go to google and find my answer because live search sucked so bad, lol!
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|hmm, more hits gives them more test info on their network I guess, but in general the only reason for doing this I can think of (as the search isn't actually necessary for the game, and physical prizes for something like this are unheard of) is to artificially boost their search percentage, to make them look better, and pull some of googles market.
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|This is great - since our education system is incapable of teaching kids how to spell - maybe MS can.
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|I think it is so typically "Microsoft" to try anything it can except improving the quality of its s***ty search. What are they to do when a new name doesn't work and a snazzy new look doesn't work. You just know they'd never consider a search that actually worked better.
cmsix
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|And there is no limit on the number of accounts, games, or prizes. There are bots available now that you can use to pump up your searchs and win prizes.
if you want to find a bot to win prizes for you, just google it.
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|Yeah, you can use bots if you're a lamer and want your account IP banned. The games aren't that hard, why ruin a good thing by trying to cheat. You'll also regret it when one of these "bots" turns out to be a nice trojan.
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|Not cheating, just giving Microsoft what it wants in exchange for the prize. They don't care how you do it as long as the search counts go up.
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|Wrong, read some of the other forums. They are blocking it by checking to see how fast forms are filled in and asking for confirmation numbers, and accounts have been banned. By all means though go right ahead...
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|Chicktionary bots don't fully work.
So much for that..... it takes way too long to earn anything of consequence.
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|you gotta have a LOT of spare time on your hands.... plus, there are some bugs onsite that waste time.
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|It does take a lot of time to get anything, after 3 days I finally got enough for the wireless 360 controller. I can't imagine how long it would take to get to 20,000 for the Zune or Vista, and you can't even get enough points for the 360 at the moment (isn't there a law against promoting prizes you can't actually win). It needs a lot of work, they need more games and definately more prizes. Most of the stuff they are offering is crap I wouldn't take for free anyway. Song downloads, ringtones, a pitiful 256mb thumb drive and some really bad headphones. I was going to try and get a Zune for my niece but I just don't think I can play these boring games long enough to get it.
They are definately cracking down on botting, trust me you don't want to do it. They will take your points away and you'll get nothing.
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|So let me see if I understand this. Instead of playing stupid games for imaginary rewards, I can play stupid games and get real stuff? I'm there! Of course there's probably a catch, there always is. How many points does it take to get something like Vista? 300 million? Still it's worth taking a look at I suppose...
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|Every time you make a word in the puzzle they look it up in live search for you. Microsoft is CHEATING to get more hits than Google. LMAO! Oh well, long as I get my prizes.
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|Every time I find myself in IE, (usually because I'm borrowing a machine or under a new login) and I use the search bar, thinking that I have preset it to google, but instead, I get live search, I immediately am unimpressed. the results from live search don't begin to compare with google. I input error messages from event logs. google? it finds me relevant info on the first page. On live search, I either get nothing returned, or completely unrelated results.
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|it seems hot and cold for me. I've been using Live as my default for a while now, since google has begun to get kinda cloudy results (and a lot of people tricking google results with their sites)
For error messages, I definately agree with you, i never find the right results in Live.com.
However for more general searches, Live tends to show me more "legitimate" sites on the subject matter, where Google usually points me to peoples' blogs.
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|i'm just so used to google, that everything else looks wrong. It's not that I compare the results and determine the % of good sites vs bad, but when it's not google it doesn't feel right.
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|I tried Live for a while, it seems faster than Google but in most cases Google returns better results. That's not to say Live is bad, it is definately my second choice. I agree that for certain searches Live returns less garbage.
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