Bing is discontinuing their Bing Cashback program as of tonight at 9 PM PST. The program allowed customers to receive a percentage of their purchase back (anywhere from 2% – 10% usually) if they visited the merchant using Bing’s shopping search. As a consumer, I thought this was an awesome program. I got over $100 back when I bought my new laptop from HP a few months ago.

The reason I’m writing a post about it though is because I also loved the program as a merchant.

Detailed Image was accepted into the program just over a year ago. The “onboarding” process was a total pain – the spec was 40+ pages and changed during my development (without notifying me of course), it impacted just about every key page on our site (home page, item page, checkout page, order complete page), and it took almost a month for them to test our site before approval – but once we got it going, it was pretty awesome.

We set it up so that for every sale we paid out our affiliate rate, which is calculated using a previously-determined formula that factors in our cost of goods sold to allow us to pay out as much as we can while still making a profit after other discounts are factored in (sale prices, coupon codes, etc). Generally this number is in the 4-6% range, but it can obviously vary depending on the type of product.

I really wanted to write a post about all of this at the time, but we decided this was one of those things we’d rather not draw attention to since none of our competitors were part of the program. This unfortunately has been happening more lately, which kind of sucks…but I digress.

As time went on it provided a steady flow of sales, nothing business-changing, but nothing to ignore either. Every new customer and every sale matters, and Bing was definitely bringing us some large sales and some new customers. Even when our current customers used it, I’d like to believe that they bought more because they knew they were getting a percentage back, although that’s impossible to validate.

I spent this morning removing the Bing code from our site. I was saddened and a bit disappointed that Bing gave up on the program. It worked for me as a consumer, and it worked for us as a business. Which begs the question – why couldn’t they make it work? I wasn’t able to find any “reason” in all of the articles I read, but there were a lot of internal problems I observed. My guess is that they just couldn’t make a profit on the commissions we paid out to them. It’s an expensive operation that they were probably running at a loss in hope of gaining market share, but due to it’s popularity probably spiraled out of control. The people I worked with on their team were clearly overworked. There’s no doubt that this required a massive staff to maintain. They also never quite got the developer/site-owner side of things down correctly – the feed processing was buggy, the admin interface didn’t function very well, there was no confirmation of deposits made until the money showed up in our account days later, and so on.

Still, it was a pretty innovative idea, that seemingly could work. I give them credit for trying on such a massive scale. I hope someone tries again. Until then, we’ll have to live with their new shopping program, which unfortunately appears to just be a clone of Google Product Search. Right on that page they say that “the Bing audience is 11 percent more likely to make online purchases than Google searchers”. I think it’s safe to say that they can expect to lose that advantage starting tomorrow.

I am a frequent commenter on Adam’s blog, beyond the blog we’ve become good friends over the last few years and enjoy sharing business stories and other lifestyle/technology concepts we come across.  As the story I’m about to share with you unfolded Adam was the first person I knew I was going to tell and he suggested a guest post for his blog, which leads us to the story.

I was out to dinner with some friends a little over a week ago, two married couples and I.  I won’t say that the two husbands (we’ll call them John and Steve) don’t like each other but they are at odds with each other, in particular with certain topics.  One of these topics is living through search engines, namely Google.  John is a self proclaimed Googleholic he will not do anything, buy anything or go anyplace without Googling it first.  Steve uses Google for researching, for example looking into buying a new cell phone, but doesn’t like it for reviews or let it influence him too much.  He argues, and this is where it gets interesting, that John is no longer capable of thinking for himself, his statements are derived from Google, his opinion is no longer his opinion, it is what he reads from Google.  Additionally, Steve feels that you are depriving yourself of experiencing life through heavy Google usage, a restaurant may have a bad review or two and may be an outstanding place to eat.

This really got me thinking, I am a heavy Google user, in addition to averaging 34.2 Google searches per day(Google tracks this for you, in case you didn’t know) I’m using no less than 21 Google Products on my Google Account Page.  A lot of my searching is because I recently moved over 750 miles from my home town/state and am learning a lot about my new area, Google has made this experience much easier.  I’m not making excuses for my usage but I own two businesses, one of which is a web business and work almost exclusively through my computer/from home, a lot of my searching is for work.  That is not the case for John, he is a blue color worker and that means he’s away from the ability to search for at least 8 hours a day.

The real question is, how much Google searching is too much?  Are we living better quality lives because we don’t need to have an experience to gain the knowledge from others?  This reminds me a book by Barry Schwartz called The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less only with a Google twist.  If we’re not to the point that we are virtually experiencing life, we are approaching it very rapidly – be warned!

Adam here: my thoughts are that this is a REALLY interesting topic. I too have a Google addiction, but I also don’t really want to know everything about everything I’m just about to do.  It’s kind of why I personally don’t like the concept of online dating.  It turns something that is adventurous and curious into a process that’s kind of like buying a car.  At some point you just have to get out there and live.  I also think that, in a way, the wealth of information hinders us from doing things.  In particular, starting a business.  There’s so much info out there that you can get sucked in to thinking you need to do 50 things before you can even consider starting a company, when almost none of that is as important as simply meeting a need that people are willing to pay for.  On a more personal level, I try to use my Googling to my advantage when traveling.  Often times my girlfriend and I will hop in the car and take a day trip to a small town in Massachusetts or Vermont on a whim because we heard it was a cool place, with no more info than the town name to throw into our GPS.  We explore the town and sometimes never need to use the technology available to us.  But by knowing that we have smart phones at our disposal, we don’t have to plan as much.  If we get lost, we use the GPS and/or our phones.  If we can’t find a place to eat, we can Google it.  The same technology that can cripple you can also be used to your advantage, depending on how you approach it.

There are soooo many instances where I want results from only within the last week or the last year. In particular, any time I have a programming question, I want an answer within the last year…not something similar from 2001 that doesn’t apply to today’s web. A solution that worked on PHP 4 a few years back, might not be the best/safest solution for a site running PHP 5 in 2009.

When I installed Ubuntu 9.10 a few weeks ago just after it had been released, I had an issue with Compiz Fusion graphics and only wanted answers from within the previous week (no sense in looking at resolutions from a previous version of Ubuntu). I also filtered by forums and by blogs to see what other type of results I could get. The most helpful results came from forums within the past week, which of course makes sense.

Previously I would have had no way of getting to those answers this quickly (or really at all). Thank you Google.

Take that Adam-McFarland.com!

Only took me like 3 years of actively maintaining a blog while that site hasn’t changed since about 1998…

When I woke up today and combed through my morning email I was shocked to see that yesterday Google announced that they would be releasing a browser today.  Usually these things leak out sooner, but I hadn’t heard anything other than the same type of vague rumors that you hear about a gPhone or gOS.

Google Chrome, as it’s called, was released today at noon and can be downloaded for XP/Vista (Linux and Mac soon to follow).  After reading the comic and watching the video, I was excited to download it and take it for a spin. While all of the features sounded nice, I didn’t know what to expect.  Just because they say that they “started a browser from scratch” and that it’s designed for “today’s web applications and not the web pages of 1998″ doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any better than IE7, Firefox 3, Safari, Opera, etc.

After playing with it for 10 minutes I feel confident in saying:  it is better than all of them.  Noticably better.  It is now my default browser.

Here are my thoughts:

• It is sooooooo much faster than other browsers that it isn’t funny.  Google spent a lot of time highlighting the new javascript rendering and crash control, and for good reason. Pages load a lot faster than in FF3 or IE7, and the “crash control” isolates each tab so if one crashes your entire browser session doesn’t.  They even have a task manager where you can see which tabs are using the most resources, very similar to the Windows task manager.  I tried apps like Gmail and Google Reader and they absolutely flew relative to the other browsers I had open.
• New tabs aren’t blank.  Instead they show thumbnails of your most visited sites, a list of your most recent bookmarks, a search box to search bookmarks, and a list of your most recent searches.
• Gone is the search box in the upper right.  Everything is in one bar – your history, your searching, and your web addresses.  The first drop down for anything you type is “search on Google”.  Subtle yet awesome.
• Less clutter – I’d say I have an extra 5% viewing space than I do in FF3.  Despite that, it’s still super simple to find everything.  Nothing I can think of that other browsers have is inherintly missing.  It just works.
• It appears to render exactly like Firefox, which is what I figured it would do (since portions are modeled on Mozilla’s engine).  This is good news for developers.
• Speaking of which, the developer tools are solid.  I still prefer Firebug in Firefox, but that might be just because it’s what I know and am familiar with.  The javascript debugging appears to be better than other tools I’ve used, although I don’t do a ton of JS debugging right now.
• Did I mention it’s REALLY FAST?

Download it and see for yourself.  It installs in seconds and imports everything from Firefox or IE so you can pick up right where you left off.

I have yet to really consider how much of a mainstream impact this could have and how it could change the future of the web.  For the time being I’m just enjoying a new browsing experience (I’m typing this post in it right now).  In the past I’ve been critical of all of the half-assed crap that Google releases and slaps “beta” on, but this is different.  It is very refined.  Microsoft should definitely be worried.  Google is creeping more and more into our everyday lives where Microsoft used to be.  Can’t wait to see how this unfolds.

P.S. The spacing on this post was messed up when I first hit submit. Guess it isn’t perfect yet.

P.S.S. I had some trouble in phpMyAdmin (which is how we access our MySQL databases).  Chrome wasn’t executing queries.  It’s no longer my default browser.  That lasted all of 30 minutes.  Oh well, I still stand by everything I said above.  For most browsing it is still fantastic.  I’m sure they’ll work out the minor kinks soon.

To the Cuil Management Team:

Earlier this week it was brought to my attention that you launched your new search engine.  With an index of some 120 billion web pages, you claim to be the largest and most relevant search engine around.  So I just took a spin over and executed a few queries.  And I must say – the results are horrible. 

How can a search for “SportsLizard” result in a link to my old blog that was moved over here a year ago?  SportsLizard does happen to be one of the more popular collectibles sites on the web.  Wouldn’t want to actually return the SportsLizard.com home page or anything…

Then a search for “sports card price guide” showed up in your auto-suggest box but yielded no results!  There are only like 10 legit online sports card price guides, many of which have been around since the dawn of the internet.  Don’t have those in your 120 billion pages huh?  While we’re on the topic:  why does a search for my name not yield this domain?  Umm, this is Adam-McFarland.net?  At least return the tool over on Adam-McFarland.com!

I’ll admit, you impressed me by showing PureAdapt.com when I searched “Pure Adapt”.  I mean, five minutes ago that wouldn’t have done anything for me, but your results were so bad that I was actually shocked to see some accuracy.  Then again, you do display a totally irrelevant skull next to our name.  Wtf is up with that?

In short – your search engine sucks.  Google is still FAR more relevant for 99.9% of queries.  Stop hating on my company.

Sincerely,

Adam McFarland
Co-Owner, Pure Adapt Inc
www.PureAdapt.com

Today I got my first real alert. It worked perfectly – Google Reader saw that the feed had been updated and notified me of the new item. I looked, saw the release of a new album (albeit an international release of an album already out), and I was like “wow, this is pretty cool”.

I also noticed that Music Alerts comes up #3 on a Google search of “music alerts”. Pretty cool to be just behind MTV and MSN after just a few weeks. I also find it satisfying that I’m now ahead of that stupid service Barnes and Noble offers where you can sign up for alerts for a whopping 30 artists.

Anyway, I’ll hopefully get some time towards the holidays to promote it. As long as it keeps working well for me, I’m going to be supremely confident in it and be as aggressive as I can with pushing it. We’re obviously not going to spend a lot of money on a side project (i.e. none), so I think the only real chance it has is to catch the “viral” bug and get caught up on the tech sites and blogs – certainly a possibility, but obviously not an easy accomplishment. We’ll see.

Well supposedly today they are supposed to launch so I figured I’d give my $.02 on whether or not I thought it was worth using.  I’ve been a beta tester for a little less than a week now, and I’ve got mixed feelings on the whole thing:

What they claim to be:  “The world’s first true live search engine.  Searching the internet will never be the same.”

What they actually are:  A browser plug-in that starts with search results from Google, Yahoo, or MSN (your choice) and then indexes the pages on the domain of the top results “live” using your computer to expand upon and re-order the results.

What I like:  It’s an interesting way to look at the web.  For example, a Google Search for “Custom McFarlane” returns 2 results from SportsLizard and 3 results from articles linking to SportsLizard that I wrote.  Clearly we dominate that niche.

A search on MyLiveSearch starts with SportsLizard at the top, but ends with eBay dominating the rankings because there are hundreds of custom McFarlane figures being sold on eBay. SportsLizard is the second site that appears, but it takes a bunch of scrolling (or some refining of the results) to find SL.  As MyLiveSearch crawls the sites “live” it re-orders them based upon what they find.

You’ll notice that it does a poor job of sorting which pages are most important.  Clearly the Custom McFarlane home page is most relevant to the query, but it shows other SL pages ahead of it when I narrow the results to only show pages from our site.  MyLiveSearch also shows you who indexed the site and when – so they start with a page Google indexed a few days ago and then index and sort the rest “live”.

I personally think they did a bad job on this query, ranking eBay ahead of us because of the quantity of content.  However, it’s still pretty cool to watch and I can at least relate to where they are coming from and appreciate their attempt at innovation.   There are a handful of features that allow you to focus results more on news results (i.e. Google News) and group the results by site, but nothing that really does much for me.  Overall for other queries I got solid results, but nothing I’d say that was that much better than Google.

What I don’t like about it:  In order:  installing a plug-in to run a search sucks, having to login to perform a search sucks, the time to run a search is annoying (I had searches take up to a minute to complete…eh), and the false promise that you actually index the web live doesn’t sit well with me.  I suppose you are technically indexing live, but it would be a lot more convincing if the live indexing was being done on a central server and not on my CPU.

Bottom line:  MyLiveSearch is  creative and different, but not so creative and so different that Google couldn’t copy it in a few days.  I’m pretty sure that if you gave me a few months I could program something similar…and I’m not even that great of a programmer.   In the end, the login and plugin crush any chance I have of using it with any regularity.  Fun to toy with, but Google still rules.