Bribery, while useful, isn’t always an effective means of obtaining a large user base, Microsoft has discovered.  Microsoft announced today that it will retire the Bing cashback program because not enough people stuck around after taking advantage of it.

Sentimental types can argue all they want, but the only thing reliably better than a bribe is a bigger bribe, and Bing’s attempting to capitalize on this fact.  "Double saving days" have begun, which means that Bing users can get twice the amount of money back as usual.

From now until the end of the month (although Microsoft’s reserved the right to end the promotion early), Bing’s cashback program will be in high gear.  Total cashback rewards of up to 50 percent are available, and most of the stores that were already onboard are participating.

Nearly three years after declaring search engines may need to pay their users, Microsoft may be on the cusp of doing that for users of Live Search.