Microsoft Hopes Prizes Will Attract New Searchers

BertieBaggio writes "Remember the long-running e-mail hoax that had Bill Gates testing an "e-mail tracing program" and offering to pay recipients big bucks if they passed his test e-mail along to all their friends? Well, the offer is true, sort of. Microsoft wants you to use its search engine, and it's got $1 million worth of prizes up for grabs for those who nibble at the offer. Following Yahoo's recent consideration of offering prizes to searchers, is this another tactic to lure users away from Google with candy and other shiny things?"

Comments

Re:Oh ya!

[CyricZ]

Existing search engines that have a similar scheme only allow you to win on your first ten searches per day, or something along those lines, in order to prevent automated searching abuses.

The art of innovation

[sl4shd0rk]

Baldy: (grumbling about killing google - off camera)
Bill : Steve, we need a new innovation.
Baldy: (grumbles about google search.. and killing it)
Bill : That's a great idea, we need a search engine! Like .. uh .. Google's
Baldy: (erupting in a maniacal tantrum) I'll fucking kill Google! (throws chair)
Bill : I guess this has already been done... hey wait a minute. Google isn't *paying* anyone to use their search engine!! We can pay people to use our search engine!! What do you think Steve?
Baldy: (chewing on shoelaces, mumbling)
Bill : I think it's a splendid Idea! Release the prize hounds immediately!

Re:Search engines searching search engines

[dasnov]

Most search engines have in their robots.txt to disallow their results page (including google and msn search). So if the search engine follows the robots.txt file then this wouldn't happen.

A9 already does this

[AuMatar]

You get a Pi/2 (1.57%) discount at Amazon.com if you use the A9 search engine. No competition, everyone who uses it regularly gets it.

Try any of their KB searches.

[badfrog]

Any IT people try to search their knowledge base? Of course you have. Which means you probably know it's easier most of the time to type any error message in on Google, which usually finds the correct KB article.

Then again, hopefully their KB doesn't use the same engine as MSN.

Re:Damn...

[psergiu]

It IS a dirty trick:

Quote from the Official Rules:

6) ELIGIBILITY: This Promotion is open only to legal residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia, 18 years of age or older at the time of entry.

The prizes will be received only by Fat Old Americans - who - as anyone knows - cannot properly use a computer.