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I’ve been following the search engine wars which I covered in my last article on Bing almost one year ago: ChaChing, Microsoft Pays Users to Search With Bing. As noted in that piece, Microsoft's (MSFT) Bing made great strides, establishing itself as a valid search engine, creating strong brand name recognition, and stealing market share from its competitors, albeit, usually from Yahoo (YHOO), rather than Google (GOOG).

Fast forward nearly one year and what do we see? According to Nielsen, Microsoft has continued to increase its name recognition and market share, even inching ahead of Yahoo’s to steal the 2^nd place ranking this past August. Much of this growth was thanks to its cashback program which was immensely successful, perhaps too successful. Microsoft had reportedly paid out millions of dollars to shoppers who purchased their products through the Bing site. Yet according to this recent Microsoft blog post, despite its popularity, Bing did not see the “broad adoption” it hoped for. In other words, users were only using Bing to search for products to buy, and would then get paid by Microsoft for their trouble. But those same users were still using Google for their everyday searches. So as of July 30, 2010, Microsoft scrapped the program all together with a promise that something bigger and better would be coming soon. 

Since the cashback program was cancelled, Bing’s steady growth has stagnated while innovative projects at Google such as its new “instant search” are helping it maintain a healthy lead. Meanwhile, we finally learned what Microsoft's new initiative would be which was neither bigger nor better...

On September 22^nd, Microsoft launched its latest program, Bing Rewards. Unlike Bing Cashback, which only rewarded users when they actually made a purchase through the search engine, Bing rewards users for doing any search at all. However, like its cashback program, this concept is nothing new and seems to be a pretty obvious clone of existing rewards programs such as Swagbucks. With such sites, users earn points for doing specific searches. For instance, Bing gives users a point for every two Bing searches, plus additional bonus points for specific actions such as registering for Bing rewards (250 point bonus) or visiting a sponsors website (6 point bonus). Users can then trade in these points for various rewards such as Amazon gift cards and electronics. Users will also have to download the Bing toolbar in order to participate in Bing Rewards
This is now the third time Microsoft has tried this 'pay users to search with Bing' approach. First Microsoft launched Search Perks for Live Search back in October 2018, then Bing cashback, as discussed previously. There’s even Club Bing, an online gaming website that offers rewards.
But will continuing to try to bribe users to choose Bing work? Or once again, will the searches stop once the rewards do? And these current perks are far less attractive than the cashback promotion which earned users as much as 50% of their purchase price back in actual cash. 

It's too early to say if Bing Rewards will be a success, but it seems that Microsoft is continuing to reuse the same failing strategy over and over again. If it failed with high cash payment rewards, why would a watered-down version work better? To me, this is simply strike three. Microsoft should follow Google's lead and offer a better user experience rather than attempt to lure users away with costly incentives. Most likely, Microsoft will simply be rewarding users who are already using Bing.