MSN has recently announced it is going to start paying searchers when they convert on particular websites, similarly to an affiliate program but the money going to the searcher not a website.
Sounds like it could be a potentially innovative approach to changing search engines as we currently know them.
To start with it will more people using Live search, taking some of Google’s market share but only for corporate websites, if there is no monetary conversion then I can only assume they will be no financial reward to the searchers. As the internet is about 80% information I think this is still a rather large percentage of searchers sticking with Google due to their superior results and relevance.
As users start to rate the service they received from the corporate website and MSN having a large database of conversion data, MSN’s results will start to take all this information into account making MSN the search engine for great deals and service and Google becoming the search engine for information, (or will that be Wikipedia?). This could be a potential threat to Google and will be interesting to see how they react.
There could be the potential problem of websites not wanting to share their conversion data with MSN, will this mean they will never rank in the Live results?
Also could this mean searchers are purchasing goods or services with the intention of returning them so they get their money for nothing from MSN? I’m sure there will be plenty that try, meaning the idea could prove to be a very big headache for the websites selling the products or service.
There are a lot of potential problems with this idea but if it works it could be a big step in Microsoft’s desire to compete with Google in the search engine market.
