You may be familiar with Live Search features such as Instant Answers or the option to donate to charity for every search or earn cash back from some stores, but did know know that between Oct 1st 2008 and April 15th 2009 you can earn personal rewards for searching?

Search Perks installs a small toolbar called as the Perk Counter (it works in IE7 and IE8) that tracks points for every search you perform at Live.com and at the end of the promotion if you’ve accumulated enough points (aka “tickets”) you can exchange those for ring tones, Messenger emoticons, music downloads, books, games and other rewards.

Although the Perk Counter tracks your search and banner click activity (or Live Search pages) it does not track what you search for or which websites you visit.

You can use the perk counter to get a quick overview of your current number of tickets, as well as jump quickly to the Search Perks site to check out the FAQs or see what prizes are available. You can also read more at the Live Search Blog.

Are there times when you just want to find an answer to a simple fact? You could go look it up (apparently some people do still use books!) or even phone a friend, but Live Search offers some really cool Instant Answers to many common (and not so common) questions.

• Lost and confused? Just ask “where am I?”
• Watching your weight and need to know how many “Calories in a moose” or less obscure “Calories in a Turkey” (it’s almost Thanksgiving!)
• Want to solve an equation …. this will give you an answer for X where “X^2+2*X+0.5=0”
• “height K2”, “height Mt. St. Helens”
• Have you ever wondered the “weight of an elephant”… well the answer is there at your fingertips.
• Ever wondered “what size is the pentagon?” Now you know.
• You can track any UPS, FedEx etc. package just by entering the tracking number
• Want to get away from the weather – check out a “flight from Seattle to Miami” .
• Curious about some world facts? Just ask for the “Population Arizona”, “life expectancy China”, “literacy rate South Korea”, or even “population per physician USA”
• “define loquacious”
• “traffic”
• “weather”
• Did you ever wonder who the “Prime Minister of Canada” or the “Queen of England” was?
• It even has “the answer to Life the Universe and Everything”

As you can see, there are many sorts of questions that Instant Answers can help you with. They use the power of the Live search engine to make sense of the information available (and you even get to say if it’s useful or not to help improve the quality of the results).

Take a tour of Live Search to see what other cool things it can do that you never knew about :)

Meantime don’t forget the other great Live Search services like Cashback and SearchAndGive as well as Live Search for Mobile…

A short while ago Live Search allowed you to sign up to get something back when you bought through participating vendors you found when using Live Search

Now you can contribute to good causes every time you do a search

By signing up at www.searchandgive.com, you can start donating one-cent to more than 100,000 schools and 900,000 non-profit organizations worldwide, every time you use the Internet to find whatever you’re looking for. Once you’ve signed in and set your default recipient you can set Search and Give as your default search provider for your browser.

You can also convert the tickets you earn playing games on Microsoft’s Live Search Club, into donations for those same schools or charities, and make donations just for chatting with Windows Live Messenger.

So what are you looking for? Find it at www.searchandgive.com

The search engine wars are heating up with shopping a prime mover … why advertise or try to get your search results higher if you don’t want to promote something after all.

Apart from helping us find things search hasn’t traditionally been a very “giving” process. The search engine providers, advertisers and folks creating pages to serve us click-through's are the ones making all the money.

Now that’s set to change with the introduction of Live Search CashBack. The idea is simple… you look for something you’re interested in and… you have the option of buying it from someone who will put money back into your pocket (via PayPal, bank transfer or check) just for shopping with them. Everyone gets part of the reward, advertisers get more customers, users get value, Live gets more search and everyone is happy.

The service was announced at Advance08 and has already received some positive reactions.

I had a quick play for the first time today… sign-up is quick and simple, and the process fairly straight forward. Give it a try…