A $ Opportunity? Or REALLY Bad News for Squidoo?

Evidently, Microsoft’s failure to take over Yahoo, which caused so much uncertainty in the market, was cemented by a new program by Microsoft. They’ve declared the intention to ‘disrupt the current search market’ and have developed a new program to do just that.

Called ‘Cashback Live Search‘ a person receives, evidently, the best deals on the internet, and the advertiser or the purchaser receives cash back when sufficient purchases are made through Microsoft.

This is another attempt by Microsoft to dig deeper into the internet search market.

Will Amazon, no matter what its relationship to Google or to Microsoft, give up its market share to this? What about Ebay, what about Google?

In my estimation, this may cause some pain for all of us for a while, especially since the providers whose products we may be selling on our Squidoo pages are able to offer them for sale directly to Microsoft.

Purely commerce pages will certainly suffer if the suppliers are working with Microsoft (at least temporarily).

Since search itself, as defined by Google, is NOT entirely commerce oriented, I believe that the content of your page, your ingenious approach, your personal recommendations will make all the difference whether people continue to shop Squidoo, and shop your pages, rather than Microsoft’s Cash Back Search.

Microsoft has decided to enter the pure commerce field of search, and give people money for participating. I believe we need to offer much more than just commerce to hold position.

What do you think?