Is Microsoft the new All Advantage/ Zotspot?

Microsoft announced this week that it's going to give back advertising revenue to users when they make a purchase after conducting a Microsoft Live search. Ad Age has a good write-up. Does anyone remember All Advantage?http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif Or zotspot? A quick search reveals other players such as Slashmysearch, Blingo, Winzy and Luckysearch. You might wonder, what do all of these have in common? They fail. Why? Because the economics of search require the search provider to make money somehow - and to have great search results. None of these players ever gave 100% of the ad revenue to the searcher but Microsoft is doing just that. If I was a Microsoft shareholder, I'd rather have them buy treasury bills than throw money at users - this really reeks of a desparate attempt to regain some lost search market share from Google.