Microsoft's Live Search market share jumped from 8.4% to 13.2% in the period of May to June (this year) according to Compete, Inc, a company that tracks and monitors website traffic. That's awesome news for M$, but a lot of people are saying that most of that increase has been because of Live Search Club, a site made by M$ where you play games that mostly involve using Live Search to find answers to trivia or other things. You win tickets which you can exchange for pretty snazzy prizes; Xboxes, copies of Vista, USB headsets - all Microsoft stuff of course.

Other estimations say that without Live Search Club, their market share should only have crept towards the 9% mark. So, because of competitions with shiny prizes Microsoft's battle against Google in the search engine market got them an extra 4% market share - even if most of that 4% is just from bots.

This just goes to show that competitions really do help promote your sites.