Microsoft Live Search Club^[1] has created a game that provides a way for users to have fun in searching for keywords.  Similar to the board game, Scrabble, the game Microsoft made has 7 hens with letters attached to them.  When you click on the letter, it drops in the yellow box below.  For example, I wrote the word, Nodes and my score raised because it is an actual word.

“Google finally has a competitor join it in the (until now) exclusive, positive-year-over-year-growth club. MSN/Live increased their query volume by 67% from May, and 48% from a year ago. Search volume was up all across the board in June and took most everyone else in the same direction,” wrote Steve Willis on the Compete Blog^[2].  “A good portion of the additional Live searches are coming from the Live Search Club, where you can apparently play games for points which you can redeem for fine Microsoft products. All of the games involve using Live’s search engine - to get the points, you have to search with Live.”

comScore stats revealed that Google and Yahoo! market share dropped 1% in June and Live.com rose 3%.  Some of the prizes on Club Live include T-Shirts, song downloads, ring tones, USB drives, headphones, etc.  Not a bad marketing campaign.