Simon’s Blog

By now, I’m sure you’ve read all about Microsoft’s announcement of “Live Search Cash Back” – an all-new offering in the vertical search market of commerce a.k.a. “when people do on-line searches to find products they’re looking to buy.” Bill Gates has just been talking about it at Advance08.  You can watch some video of Bill’s keynote, over at Techcrunch.

Now, for reasons that will be revealed in the coming months (remember the name, Togalo, by the way… you heard it here first -  for the very, very first time   ), I’m pretty interested in vertical search, particularly in the area of commerce.   So, I’m going to be following what Microsoft is doing in this area pretty closely. People don’t generally realise just what a huge market so-called “commerce search” actually is.  How huge, is huge?  Well, here are some numbers that Mike Arrington jotted down on Techcrunch…

Commerce represents about a third or all searches, but the “dominant” share of revenue from search advertising. It’s a “very big part of the $20 billion search market.” Microsoft cites eMarketer: U.S. online retail is projected to grow to $335 billion by 2012, and today 68 percent of all those retail transactions begin at a search engine. This translates to 3.7 billion commerce-related queries a month.

Those are some pretty interesting numbers, I think you’ll agree;  but I think I’ll leave the discussion there… just for now…

Update:

There’s lots of great coverage of Microsoft’s new offering around the net – it’s certainly got people talking!  An interesting perspective about Live Search Cash Back is on Danny Sullivan’s blog.  Danny finds Microsoft’s offering frustrating to use.  If lots of people agree with Danny, that’s going to be a problem for MS’s offering. For my money, the key thing about any vertical search engine is to have technology that genuinely helps people find what they’re looking for; and to do so significantly better than Google does.  Otherwise, there’s really no point. Only time will tell if Live Search Cash Back is going to do that effectively…