Search Engines' Reward Programs 83
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Search engines are dangling rewards and cash prizes to attract customers to their sites, the Wall Street Journal reports. MSN is offering free nights at the Four Seasons and other goodies to people who search for one of roughly a thousand terms on a rotating list. Yahoo's GoodSearch donates a penny to charity for each search. And Blingo hawks giveaways including iPods. But, the WSJ reports, 'There are strings attached to some of the reward programs. Some require users to register personal information like a name or email.'"
hacked (Score:5, Interesting)
I use www.a9.com (Score:3, Interesting)
interesting, but don't lump Google into this mix (Score:5, Interesting)
MSN is doing it (offering free nights at the Four Seasons); Yahoo's "GoodSearch" is doing it (but nicely -- donating pennies to charity); but Google is not doing it, but Blingo is.
If you look at the Blingo "about us" page, at the bottom you'll find:
Just wanted to set the record straight, since I still kind of believe Google means it when they say "do no evil".
Let's try something different... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not just search engines... (Score:2, Interesting)
If you weren't familiar with it, iTunes was giving away a $100 iTunes card and a 4GB iPod Nano for every 100,000th song downloaded. The grand prize, though was a 20-inch iMac, 10 5th generation iPods and a $10,000 iTunes card.
Give aways are just a good way to encourage business.
Re:Door Prizes (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:desperate measures (Score:3, Interesting)
No more than grocery markets that use "club cards" to give discounts to regular shoppers suck. When it comes to search engines, Google is the best known, the most used. For a new site to succeed, they need some way of getting people to use it, and random giveaways are simply a marketing tool. I've never received anything from Blingo, but I do use it, and from their POV that's what matters. Mind you, I also use Google, if I can't find it through Blingo.