When Microsoft launched its cashback program in May this year, there were much buzz in the industry news and blogs about its success. Now months later, Microsoft’s success gaining more share in searches among the three major search engines looks more obvious. The Comscore data shows a 15% rise in search queries for Microsoft while Google and Yahoo! showed 6% and 9% rise respectively for June.
Now it’s time for more intimacy with Facebook of which MS has bought 1.6% with $240 million last October. Reuters report says that Microsoft will expand its live search (of course together with search ads) on FB. Microsoft is trying hard to be a serious search engine like Google. That endeavours let the CEO Steve Ballmer to pursue buying Yahoo!. But as Jerry had a successful deal with Mr. Carl Icahn, so the chances to shake the
But if Microsoft will provide the API to Facebook to create a rich search options for its more than 132 million users worldwide, it will take a big stake of search percentage from the now dominating Master Google. According to WebProNews, “This change should bring Microsoft a reasonably sized new stream of search revenue”.
Why Ballmer’s team did not work in this direction rather spent plenty of time and money to buy Yahoo! is a good question. The MS leadership is not wise enough in its judgement. It failed completely buying Yahoo!. Microsoft took all the zigzag way to make the deal – but without success. If this much efforts would be given to Facebook to offer a search options for its users, things would be much better for MS by this time. However, better late than never.