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Search Engines' Reward Programs
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.'"
Some require users to register personal information like a name or email.
Wait a second - you mean they want to be able to contact me if i win?
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
So this is kind of like when you go to a conference and they have door prizes being given away by companies.
You can register for said prizes; all you have to do is fill out your name, telephone number, address and date of birth. Then, after you don't win, you get to put up for the rest of your time at that residence with crap junk mail. May the lord have mercy on your soul if you give those people your e-mail address.
If you have to log in to use your favorite search engine, I'd suggest finding a different one.
My work here is dung.
already hacked.
always mosh clockwise
Gets me pi/2 off my Amazon purchases. The rest of those 'rewards' are worthless to me.
Blar.
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".
(And yeah, boy, that whole "You have to tell us who you are so we can write out a check" tradeoff had never occurred to me. When I take the restaurant survey in hopes of winning $25 grand, they probably put me in their database, too.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Why don't you pay me to use your search engine instead? That's a fair trade. :P
For those who don't care to read through Blingo's rules, blingo works like so:
If you search during one of about 49 special time periods per day, you win.
But only your first 10 searches per day count.
And neither, for that matter, is Yahoo. From TFA:
"A new site called GoodSearch.com, launched late last year by Los Angeles-based GoodSearch LLC, aims to lure repeat users by donating roughly a cent to a charity of the user's choice every time a search is conducted on its Yahoo-based search engine."
The line referencing Blingo is similar. Somone misunderstood "Powered by Google", methinks.
Wow! There are actually still other search engines out there besides Google? Who would have imagined? I figured the other ones had all dissapeared after "google" became a word in the dictionary:P These competetors must be evil though because Google is good and they are trying to bribe users away. They should all be burned as witches!
And if they catch you searching for pr0n you'll get a really, really big prize, delivered right to your door by a couple of FBI agents.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
That's why I use Google. Every once in a while I try msn or something else and find that they pretty much suck. If they were better, I might use multiple search engines. If they were better than Google, I'd switch.
Most of you probably already know that iTunes has now given away their grand prize for downloading the billionth iTunes song.
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.
Portal Google's results, with your own google adwords for revenue.
Give out trinkets to increase the adword view counts.
Make an 'affiliates program' similar to the freeiPods.com thing to spread the word.
Not half bad, if you ask me.
I've been unable to find anything by my favorite Science Fiction authors.
And how is "Safari", a web browser, relevant? How is logging in a pain? My browser caches non-critical account passwords for me. Doesn't yours?
I think you are a Troll, and that you deserve your -1.
Blar.
AKA: If no one wants to use your product on it's merits: Offer more.
Can you say Google. Everyone uses them (not everyone, but most) because they are historically good. No one is going to change unless something is drastically better AND they know it. No one will know unless they try some other engine. Ergo, to get traffic people offer "prizes."
Basic PR. Unless the engines are really better than google, everyone will go back (Unless they really pay out the wazoo.)
Good luck to them if they can improve on G. (Although MS may subsidize it just to hurt G. No one else can afford to do that.)
$.02
If you have a problem to provide them your e-mail address, which BTW they need to notify you in case you win, then why not create one of those free accounts for this purpose? For the Microsoft search engine use a Yahoo account and vice versa. If you do not win and someone starts to send spam to the account, then just ignore it. Another fine method, which only works if you are in control of your mail server, is to use one mail account per contact with a specific number, like user101 for MSN and user102 for Yahoo. Later, if you get spam to user101, simply forward all mail addressed to this e-mail address to someone at MSN, like their service department or sales department (they love that). I used this method years ago to fix Amazon and others. It works.
There are two different stories going on here. One is search engines. MSN & A9(amazon) offer rewards for users of their search engine. Rewards are fully sponsored by search engine companies marketing budgets. This is new. Another story going on here are affiliate sites. Blingo is an affiliate site as is GoodSearch.com. These sites generate revenue by selling their traffic (or so it seems). Blingo will earn a few cents when users click on a sponsored links. Blingo adds another player into this multi level marketing scheme going on. It's not like Blingo is doing the world a favor by passing on free rewards - rather they're passing on a part of their commissions to their users.
This may seem like a distinction without a difference but look at it from an advertisers experience. Would you rather buy clicks on MSN where users are there to search products or would you rather buy clicks from Blingo where users are there only to rack up clicks and receive free iPods? Obviously Blingo & GoodSerach.com are going to generate poor quality traffic. Many companies already do this: ebates, upromise, everyfreegift.
Patches are released once a month, so you can easily achieve almost 4 weeks of uptime on XP and still apply patches. Add to that that not every patch release cycle requires a reboot, and you can indeed get months of uptime even when applying patches.
:)
Yeah, I know it's a joke, but it's not a funny one
It's official. Most of you are morons.
That's the reason there are these "free" prizes. Anyone who collects personal information is doing it for some sort of marketing purposes. They may not sell it, or even use it for junk mail or junk calls, but it is being used for some sort of marketing purpose. Even then, if there's some sort of "transaction", as it is called many times in the "terms of service" statements, the new owners of the organization (or th same owners who reorganzied)can do anything that they want, such as sell all of that customer data. Even then, the "terms of service" isn't contract, so you couldn't hold them to it - even if you could, there's always the statment, "We reserve the right to change this agreement at anytime." So, WTF even have a terms of service if they may not even abide by them.
I'm ranting now. Bye.
Saturday is April 1. Slashdot will be shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Come on, remember all the pop-ups for "Win a FREE IPOD!", "Win a FREE XBOX!", "Win a FREE DINNER at RED LOBSTER!", etc.
Click on one and you find out that in order to get it you have to buy something or sign up for a credit card or something.
I've come to ignore the "Win a blah blah blah" internet ads.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Ha, the first hit in the "Sponsered Sites" list when searching for technology on MSN's search engine is Apple's.
/snip
snip
Technology Resources at Apple.com - www.apple.com
Visit Apple's IT Pro portal to find IT related content for IT Managers and technology professionals. Find news, articles,...
Theres just isnt enought incentive.... And "Incentive" not meaning prizes are ipods or cash... Most of my day revolves around Search Engines... With google - I get what i want within the first 5 links. I DONT want to SCROLL all over the damn screen jumping through hoops/mail links/ads and what ever crap they throw at me just to get to a link im looking for.
The ol' saying Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) applies here.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
1000 terms, eh? I don't think any Slashdotters will ever win.
Asian sluts [click]
Teenage sluts [click]
Paris Hilton blowjob [click]
Hardcore action [click]
MILF [click]
Mail order brides [click]
Mother's Day Presents [click]
Online dating [click]
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
ConsultingFair.com
You win a 4 night hotel for seaching on MSN. There you are, enjoying your fine stay, browsing the net with your laptop in your room...
Some guy steps in. You look at him. It reminds you of someone. In your astonishment, you remain quiet. He moves his eyes on to your laptop. His pupils dilate. He begins to speak:
"Just tell me it's not Google".
You nod, frightened as ever. At that point, he picks up a chair and throws it across the room hitting a table you don't care about cause it's the hotel's anyway.
"I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google".
My 0.02 cents
...and all I got was a friggin' Freaks List.
A night at the Four Seasons sounds pretty good by comparison. Sign Me Up!
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.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Anyone remember the big deal about Iwon.com (or something similar) If you logged in and searched everyday you got points that went into contest and drawings
Welcome to the Dot Com Bubble 2.0
Everybody but Google is joining the party.
Offer a contest, give away cheap prizes...and get EXTREMELY valuable contact information and increased number of users.
This probably won't last very long either. Only reason its getting a lot of buzz is because all companies involved have excellent PR departments.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I'm sorry, and blingo is evil how? Because they use some of their ad revenue to buy a few prizes to encourage more eyeballs to generate more ad revenue? Or is it because they don't ask you for any personal info until you win a prize, and then only use it to ship you said prize?
SecuriTeam Blogs had entry related to French-based hosting company Jaguar Network on Feb 21th. Blog entry lists WHOIS information about this MSN's partner. The entry is discussing about the risks of registration when using Microsoft's Search & Win too: http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/316
This is actually very cool.
Except of course the ones that are there to generate sales, like "look under the cap of any 20 oz bottle of Pepsi and you could win $25,000 instantly!"
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Only now you have to go to pepsi.com, type in a code, and surrended your 'personal info' to even have a chance.
At least the 'free 20 oz of pepsi' is still written in plain english. I miss the good old days when the prize was written in the bottom of the can, and you had to squint just right to see it. all these 'efforts' to 'improve' the contests with online codes are silly, much worse than the failed attempt by coke to have cans that would dispense a note 'informing' the winner they had won a prize, only the can wasn't filled with soda, and the note could be accidently swollowed if the can wasn't 'opened properly' etc.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html