Updated: July 13, 2020 (September 8, 2008)

  Analyst Report

E-Commerce Acquisition to Bolster Search

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652 wordsTime to read: 4 min

The acquisition of Greenfield Online, which owns a set of price comparison and reviews sites under the Ciao brand, will make Microsoft’s Live Search more useful for European users who want to research and buy a product online. The acquisition complements Microsoft’s strategy of focusing on queries that indicate the user is interested in buying a product, because such queries are more likely to result in a user clicking a revenue-generating advertisement. However, previous efforts in this direction have shown no results.

More European Product Info

As part of an Oct. 2007 Live Search update, users in the United States who search for certain products on Live Search are presented not only with a list of links to third-party Web sites (as is standard on Google and Yahoo Search), but also with information about the product compiled from around the Web, including pictures, aggregate ratings from users and third-party reviewers, and links to reviews and shopping sites that offer the product. Links on the first page of search results lead to secondary pages with even more detail about particular products, such as user ratings in particular categories and excerpts of user comments. Live Search cashback, which offers users rebates on some products if they find them through the Live Search engine, was rolled out in May 2008 in the United States and continued the company’s focus on search queries with “commercial intent.”

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