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Through its ninemsn partnership with Nine Network, Microsoft is running a Secret Search promotion that rewards users just for entering certain search terms. A similar scheme is operating in the US, where surfers can get cash rebates for online purchases conducted via Live Search.

Alex Parsons, ninemsn's head of Live Search, said if Microsoft's own Zune music players was available in Australia then they would

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have been offered instead.

"Where we don't have a great product or we don't have a product at all there's no internal edict that says we're not allowed to use competitor products," he told the Brisbane Times.

Microsoft famously has an iPod bin at its Redmond, Washington headquarters and according to a Brisbane Times has been offering staff discounts on Windows Mobile phones to dissuade them from buying an iPhone.

Microsoft is continually seeking ways to boost its search offering and grab some of Google's dominant and lucrative market share. It tried and failed to buy Yahoo, but this week did succeed with a bid for Powerset, a developer of "semantic" search technology that analyses the context and meaning of text, not simply the individual, separate words and phrases.