Microsoft makes Bing/IE charity cases

2nd March 2010 by William Hobson

A new campaign from Microsoft aims to encourage users to use both the company’s search engine and their internet browser by appealing to their sense of philanthropy.

The ‘Give With Bing’ campaign, timed to coincide with the UK’s annual charity event ‘Sport Relief’, promises to donate 5p to charity for every 10 searches made using Bing. However, this isn’t just an attempt to promote the company’s search engine; marketing strategists at Microsoft are also attempting to promote the company’s Internet Explorer web browser. Searches must be made using IE 6, 7 or 8 to register for the campaign.

Although practically all companies involved with charitable events have a penchant for pushing their products at the same time, the insistence on using IE has drawn some criticism; searches made via rival browsers or on systems that don’t support IE (such as Macs) don’t count towards the tally.

This is because the tally is tracked by a downloadable “Give with Bing” Internet Explorer add-in, that keeps track of the number of searches made. Critics argue that it would be simple to make an add-in that was compatible with other browsers such as Safari, FireFox or Chrome – which would result in a wider audience for Bing and more charitable searches.

In some part, this criticism may be due to the perception of the IE browser as failing to compete on its own strengths. The browser was recently the victim of a massive wave of poor publicity due to a significant zero-day flaw that was exploited in a series of high profile cyber attacks, contributing to a 1% drop in February 2010. Although this is a small decline, according to Net Market Share reports IE has lost 6% of its share since April 2009.

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