Microsoft's Bing Shopping Grows 169% in June

According to Nytimes.: "Bing Shopping, the comparison shopping tool that is part of Microsoft's new search engine, saw some impressive growth during June. latest Hitwise data shows that traffic to Bing Shopping increased 169% last month and Bing is now the 4th most popular shopping comparison site in the US,not bad for someone who was in the 8th place just a month back last month, Bing was still in 8th place. Clearly, Microsoft's marketing muscle behind Bing.com and consumer interest in Microsoft's Double Cashback promotion brought a lot of new users to Bing Shopping in June."

Bing Shopping is customized for finding products available for sale on the web by providing information such as product pictures, pricing, and description. These products are indexed by web crawlers extracting rich meta-data from web pages.

The Bing Cashback program was launched last March (firstly as Live Search Cashback) that allowed users to search for products from multiple vendors and find their prices and offering money back for purchases made through the site.

The cashback service started in June 2006 as part of Jellyfish.com. as Microsoft announced the purchase of Jellyfish.com with an estimated price of $50 million in oct 2007.Microsoft originally intended to use the Jellyfish engine as part of their Live Search services to compete against Google.

From December 2008, Bing Cashback began offering users to receive cashbacks instantly, instead of 60 days. Currently, this feature only works in Ebay.As part of the rebrand from Live Search to Bing, on June 3, 2009, the service is now referred to as Bing Cashback.

Not Surprisingly most of Bing's competitors lost some market share during the last month. All of the top 3 shopping tools (Yahoo Shopping, Bizrate, and Shopzilla) lost between 2% and 5%.