Microsoft on Thursday entered the thriving daily deals space by launching a discount aggregation service through its Bing search engine.
The new e-commerce offering is a result of a partnership between Microsoft and Dealmap, a local deals aggregation site that collects group buying discounts and other markdowns from GroupOn, Living Social, Restaurant.com and nearly 200 other top providers, according to Business Insider.
Through its collaboration with Dealmap, Microsoft will be able to publish local deals through its PC search engine and m.bing, the company's mobile platform. The partnership will enable the computer giant to provide Bing with more than 200,000 local deals in over 14,000 cities on day one. Dealmap has attracted more than 1.4 million users in the last nine months.
Bing director Stefan Weitz told CNET that the new daily deals offering will use the search engine's algorithms to help consumers find the most attractive discounts, based on information like the size of the deal, the number of times it has been shared and the location's proximity to a mobile or PC user.
"People are not as good about finding deals as we think they are," Weitz told the news source. "The coolest thing about this is that when you pop into the m.bing experience and hit that deals button, the first thing we show you are what some of the hottest deals are for you."
Currently, daily deals for PCs only appear on Bing Local and on the profile pages for businesses that offer them. To see if a restaurant has a Bing deal available, simply initiate a search and look for a green "deals" icon to appear.
Mobile users, on the other hand, can simply click on a "deals" tab on the Bing homepage to access local discounts. The mobile search engine helps organize deals by category, keyword and location.
Beecher Tuttle is a TechZone360 contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Tammy Wolf
