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Microsoft's Live Search cashback plan has gotten lots of attention from online pundits in recent days, but what do the number-crunchers think? Jeffrey Lindsay, a financial analyst at Sanford Bernstein & Co., put out an eight-page report this morning, headlined "Microsoft's Live Search Cashback -- A Poke in the Eye for Google, but Not a Game Changer."

Among his conclusions:

While we like the new search service and think it is clever and innovative, we do not think that it has "game changing" potential – especially as currently configured. We think that in the unlikely event that Google experienced significant share loss to Microsoft as a result of Cashback, it would retaliate with a similar scheme of its own. Since Google would only need to offer a scheme with a similar number of merchants to match Microsoft's offer, we estimate the effect would be limited in scope and would not undermine margins across Google's larger market share. In this sense we see Live Cashback as more of a competitive discounting challenge than a truly disruptive new pricing model.

And later ...

While we think that Microsoft has hit upon an ingenious way to try and level the playing field with Google by "chipping in" its advertising revenues from participating online retailers to make life generally difficult for Google, we do not expect the scheme to have a high degree of success based upon the outcomes of many similar programs tried in the past. In addition, we think the Live Cashback system still appears to have a number of operational issues -- some of the participating websites showed different prices from those advertised on the Live start page, for example. Moreover, we found the system generally clunky and nonintuitive when we tried it out earlier today, likely inhibiting broad acceptance in the short term.

In related news, the latest numbers from comScore show Google's search market share in April rising to 61.6 percent in the U.S. (from 59.8 percent in March). Yahoo fell to 20.4 percent, from 21.3 percent; and Microsoft dropped to 9.1 percent, from 9.4 percent.

And it looks like Bill Gates wasn't kidding when he said earlier this week that Microsoft would be focusing most heavily on commerce-related search initiatives. In a post this morning, Microsoft search boss Satya Nadella said the company will be ending its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic programs -- keeping the results in the main index but shutting down the specialized sites.

In other words, despite the issues raised in the Bernstein analysis, Microsoft is sticking to its strategy for reversing the trend reflected in the comScore data.

"Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy," Nadella wrote, "we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner."

I'm interested in hearing what people think. Is this strategy going to work for the company?