Live Search Swallows Cashback

Live Search has swallowed Cashback, a service designed to give consumers that search, find and ultimately buy products via Microsoft’s search engine a cashback. The Redmond company indicated that with the evolution of the Cashback shopping website it aimed to deliver an improved experience to users. What the software giant did was to melt together the Live Search products-focused area with the Cashback service. Searching for items via Live Search Products now returns results that point users to the best deals set up to deliver the highest cashbacks for their online purchases.

“To bring you the best of Live Search and cashback, we’ve launched an improved cashback Shopping site. The new site unifies Live Search Products (the shopping vertical within Live Search) and cashback to make it easier for you to research, compare products, and save money,” revealed Kelly Scott, product manager, cashback Shopping.

The most recent evolution of the Cashback program was introduced in December 2008. At that time, the Redmond company brought to the table what it referred to as instantaneous cashbacks. With the release of the Instant cashback feature users are now able to see their return on their purchases immediately, without having to wait, as was the case initially. Of course, the latest evolution of Cashback also introduces new improvements.

“There are quite a few enhancements you’ll see now that we’ve combined these two interfaces. We have improved relevance and site performance now that we’ve migrated from the legacy Jellyfish technology (a company Microsoft purchased in October 2007) to our own Live Search platform. You’ll now see reviews and Opinion Ranking on the product pages. Opinion Ranking crawls the Web for reviews, categorizes them into features, then provides ratings for those product features. You can also browse by feature and sort by ratings,” Scott added, promising that additional improvements would be unveiled in the coming months.