Slashdot Mirror
Bing Cashback Can Cost You Money
paltemalte writes "Microsoft and various retailers have teamed up to bring you cashback on purchases made via Bing's price comparison feature. There is a little snag, though — it seems that when you have a Bing cookie living in your browser, some retailers will quote you a higher price than if you come with no Bing cookie in your system."
The right one is "Will people finding out cost more than lawsuits if it isn't legal". If the answer is yes, don't do it, if no then go on ahead.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Find out what sites go higher and what sites go lower in quoted prices. Fake a cookie to maximize savings or delete it altogether if it gets you a uniformly higher price.
That's the behavior I'd expect from /. . None of this Newsweek / Dateline NBC alarmist "They're using COMPUTER MACHINES to scam us!!!" Get on it, people.
This has nothing to do with Microsoft. From the article: Butterfly Photo set a three month cookie on my computer to indicate that I came from Bing.
So, a disreputable web site is setting a cookie when you click on a sales link. How is this Microsoft's fault again? What does this have to do with Bing?
A/V and photography stores are notorious for ripping off customers, both in-store and on-line. Surprise surprise, you can find these disreputable sites using search engines. Trying to blame this on Bing is like trying to blame your phone book for recommending a sketchy car mechanic.
I worked for a national healthcare system which offered a Dell employee purchase program. My wife wanted a pink laptop, and I quickly found out I could get a better deal on a regular "sale" from Dell than the "12% employee purchase program discount" could ever give me. They're scams, which attempt to con people into thinking they are getting a deal.
Same here, I get the lower price with or without cookies. Seeing as the article was written by a Bing competitor it's a way for them to get exposure.
* Step 1: Write article saying M$ is evil /.
* Step 2: Submit story to
* Step 3: Profit!
Doesn't matter if it's true or not
gypped? Ah, you couldn't close escrow and just use the term "jewed" ?
You know, where a retailer jacks up the price a bit and then claims that he's taking off say 10% because he likes you or some nonsense. The last time I had that happen was fairly recently with a cell phone carrier. (Which shall remain nameless.) This sounds like the same deal. I went on their web site and looked up how much a battery for my phone was and it listed a price. When I went to the local store they at first quoted a higher price and then said how they were giving me some money off. Surprise surprise it turned out to be the amount quoted on the web page.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Did anyone else notice the story submitter's alias links to a sex toy shopping site?
If that's what makes him happy.
Maybe he doesn't know that all subby links are tagged rel="nofollow"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It is slightly more userfriendlier(ish) than Google. And more importantly, MS pushing it as the default search engine in recent incarnations of IE, thus (l)users might start to think Bing=search engine, like they do in IE=Internet equation (Postel is turning in his grave). But the answer to your main question is "No it is not useful". Also I might add that, I would prefer Google to have my search patterns stored. At least they (seemingly) are not going to need to sell their shares to MS, with the current financial position.
The US Department of Justice can't even successfully hit them with an antitrust suit. Microsoft settled, and then laughed off the settlement. Or else we'd have those APIs at the very least, wouldn't we?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
After the search is where it gets better. The results pages on Bing are way better, and have even caused a stir at Google.
In what way? During the brief period I tried Bing, I was thoroughly unimpressed.
Giving me relevant results is the ONLY thing I care about with a search engine. Bing didn't do as well as Google - end of story. If it had done as well as Google, I still wouldn't have cared - it'd have to provide better results for me to even care.
#DeleteChrome
Not really. The merchant sets his price based on the fees he pays for the cc charge. Your rewards are dependent on the card issuer, independent of the fees the merchant is charged. Different merchants get charged different fees based on volume , number of chargebacks and the way they collected your information. Your rewards are most likely paid out of the interest the issuing bank charges yourself and other cardholders.
Given the same results, a plain presentation is almost always better.
Rule of thumb:
All great things are simple, but not every simple thing is great.
bickerdyke
It's the whole of humanity, not just "your country" (which I assume is the US if you automatically assume that he's from the same country as you).
You are perpetuating things by still thinking of things in terms of "sides". "Same side" (whatever that may refer to, presumably you mean "being American vs everything that is not American") or not.
I agree that that way of thinking is stupid and blinkered though.
which is totally what she said
I must disagree here.
Lets say you've just spend the whole day calling your ISP that you will pay the bills, just let me back online because you have a World of Warcraft raid coming later at night. You're exhausted and hungry. You cant even Skype your pizza delivery guy because your internet is down. You have to walk upstairs to call from your moms phone. You're thinking about what kind of pizza to order. Now in your case you would order only the pizza bottom. It's simple and plain with no fancy extras, you say. But I like the toppings on my pizza. Ham, pineapple slices, shrimp, salami and BBQ sauce on a pizza taste great. As a pan pizza, please. With a large mountain dew! And some chocolate ice cream as dessert.
The point here being, by mixing things together to produce the final results can sometimes, and even often, be better than just listing the plain results. This is why we don't just do a SQL query and read the results from terminal. Or at least normal people don't. Google's more plain output might be nicer for ultimate geeks, but that isn't the internet anymore.
It's funny how if it wasn't taken down I probably wouldn't even have read it, but since it was I actively sought it out, wasting an entire 5 minutes of my valuable time, and then read it over and posted it to some other places since it's a good article and I wouldn't want to see it disappear off the internet. Will they even learn?
Because websites that do that shit disable caching.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
you're right - bing doesn't have that problem, because of one reason - they aren't google.
If bing was indeed better, it will rise to the top, and now those sites (and as an EE, i absolutely know the pain in the ass sites you're talking about) will start to come up on bing, and we'll be no better off. Unless you're seriously suggesting that a few MS employees that created bing are better at conducting searches than mother google....
Me too, but they can learn if they want to. And competition can only be good for the search engine market,
Presumably, competition is usually good.
assuming it happens on a decent level.
Ah, sorry, that's where your theory fails.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
The difference is that Google's market share (~65%) has been earned through having a superior product, where most of Bing's current market share (~10%) can be easily attributed to the search engine being forced on unsuspecting IE users.
It tricked me, and I clicked on one. That is reprehensible behavior, and not the kind of thing I'd expect from a large multinational corporation.
Tired meme, or +1 funny? I choose...
You must be new here...
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."