Bing Shopping

Bing Shopping

Screenshot of Bing Shopping
Developer(s)	Microsoft
Stable release	Final / June 3, 2010
Type	Search Engine
Website	http://www.bing.com/shopping

Bing Shopping (formerly MSN Shopping, Windows Live Shopping, Live Search Products and Windows Live Product Search) was a products search service and part of Microsoft's Bing search engine, discontinued around October 1, 2013. It was customised for finding products available for sale on the web. The results provided information such as product pictures, pricing, and description. These products could be indexed by crawling the web and extracting rich meta-data from web pages.

Windows Live Shopping was originally launched in Beta form as part of Microsoft's Windows Live suite. It was built entirely on AJAX technology and had many social and community features. In addition to a retail shopping website, it featured drag-and-drop items to a shopping list, share lists with other users, product and seller reviews, public shopping guides with Windows Live Shopping Guides and an enhanced preview.

On February 20, 2007, Windows Live Shopping beta was rebranded as MSN Shopping. Part of the reason for this decision was to reduce the number of shopping services Microsoft offered, which included MSN Shopping, Windows Live Expo and Live Product Search. Microsoft's spokesperson stated that the beta testing was intended to obtain an insight into user behavior and the data would be incorporated into plans for future products. It was stated that user-created content from Windows Live Shopping beta (lists, guides, and reviews) would continue to be available on MSN Shopping.Windows Live Shopping Guides was discontinued as part of the rebranding.

As MSN Shopping, the service aggregated millions of product offers from thousands of retailers, allowing users to search or browse for products. Searches could be sorted by relevance, popularity or by price (either ascending or descending). Refinements were available to allow the user to narrow the results set.

The Bing Cashback program was a rebate program launched on May 22, 2008 (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. On October 2, 2007, Microsoft announced the purchase of Jellyfish.com with an estimated price of $50 million. Microsoft intended to use the Jellyfish engine as part of their Live Search services in attempt to catch up to Google in the search market.