US only for the moment*. Basically you search using live, buy something from a partner and Microsoft give you money once you've collected enough credits. Oh and you need a Live.com account :-P

http://search.live.com/cashback

*Apparently they do plan to release it in other countries [Source: BBC Radio 2]

This is like saying publicly "We aren't good as Google, so we pay you to see if we can wash your brain".
Don't sell your souls!

As far as I can tell, this is the way Jellyfish.com worked, and since Jellyfish was bought by MS, I'd expect it's the same technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish.com

Microsoft must have read this and thought it was a good idea :) http://searchengineland.com/080401-064948.php

Haha, I remember that one. Except that 300,000,000 (people) x 1,000,000 (dollars) doesn't equate to "just under 1 billion" no matter which definition of "billion" you use (thousand million or million million). It is less than the 'large' (and rare) definition of a trillion (a million million million)...

Any way you cut it, it would be nearly 8000 times the Yahoo! bid at the time.

Never used it...never will. MSFT is so screwed up in its branding. I will say in Yahoo's defense, tho- I get the same results from Yahoo search as Google. I just use Google for search since I'm used to it.

And I use VIsta, too; I must be the only one who doesn't hate it.

<<I'm used to it.>>

Isn't that the main argument for Windows, Office, MSN, Hotmail? :-D
(Although I use Ubuntu, Google Docs, Pidgin and Gmail)

Microsoft doesn't pay you to use Live.com
It's just a kind of discount on what you will buy. If you don't buy, you earn nothing. If you buy, you don't earn money, you will lose just less money than expected.

TOMHTML
I did include that in the OP
<<buy something from a partner>>

And from the FAQ
<<Your savings will be paid to you via your choice of a deposit to your PayPal account, direct deposit to your bank account, or a check in the mail.>>
So it's not traditional discounts :-)

I've asked a few people who have heard about it, who all think it's similar to a politician bribing you to vote for them -some of them think even worse of MS than they do now.

To be honest, the scheme was poorly marketed as "Microsoft pays users to Live.com over Google", which is partially true, but a bit misleading. Nothing like a fudged product launch from Microsoft.