Microsoft isn’t one to be left too far behind, tacking daily deals onto its Bing search product. Bing Deals for the desktop and mobile gives thousands of unique offers spanning 14,000 cities and towns in the U.S.
Being a search engine, the new Deals section aggregates offers from top providers, including Groupon, Living Social and Restaurant.com. To comb through the mounds of daily deal offerings, Microsoft’s teamed up with The Dealmap for this recommendation-based initiative.
As Microsoft’s goal with Bing is to turn the search engine into a decision-making tool, it only makes sense to import the varying resources for regular, local discounts. With Bing Deals you’ll be able to filter deals based on location, discount, and category. Bing’s a social search tool, and so are deals. With Bing Deals, offers can be posted to your social stream, and readily shared directly with friends.
But even with an aggregator and Bing search integration, the secret sauce is all about deal delivery methods. As Microsoft expands its mobile strategy for iPhones and Android devices, placing available deals alongside local searches ensures you have relevant information about a nearby venue, even if you weren’t looking specifically for discounts. Talk about a decision maker.
Bing is one of the latest to layer in deals, as targeted discounts become a popular marketing draw. Deals are working their way into a few different industries, as The New York Times looks to local offerings, and wireless carriers like AT&T find renewed uses for location-based data, extending deals to mobile users.
Kristen Nicole writes about mobile, social media and the cloud.
