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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
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.
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.
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
But do they weigh the same as a duck?
Maybe not
1000 terms, eh? I don't think any Slashdotters will ever win.
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-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Well, they float so they must weigh the same as a duck. Burn them! Burn them!
ConsultingFair.com
Maybe we should write a popup ad that says "Win Free Software!" When the user clicks on it it downloads Mozilla and turns off popups.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
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
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
This is actually very cool.