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Yahoo Considers Offering Prizes to Search Users

Posted by Zonk on Sun Feb 12, 2006 03:23 PM
from the you-get-porn-and-free-music dept.
The Internet Businesses Yahoo!
Bemmu writes "According to the San Francisco Chronicle: 'Yahoo Inc. is considering offering free music downloads, discounts on DVD rentals and frequent-flier miles to users who make the Web site their primary search engine.'" More from the article: "Offering rewards to search engine users isn't new. During the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, a number of companies including AllAdvantage.com and MyPoints.com gave cash, prizes and loyalty points to users, although many of the companies eventually went out of business or were sold at fire sale prices. That's not to say the model never works. One exception is iWon.com, a Web portal that offers cash prizes for using the site. After some success during the boom, iWon is now owned by Ask Jeeves and its parent company IAC/InterActiveCorp. " Update: 02/12 21:07 GMT by Z : Headline changed for accuracy.
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  • The headline reads:
    Yahoo Offering Prizes to Search Users
    Yet the first line of the story is:
    According to the San Francisco Chronicle: 'Yahoo Inc. is considering offering free music downloads, discounts on DVD rentals and frequent-flier miles to users who make the Web site their primary search engine.
    And, in fact, when I search on Yahoo I am not offered any chance to win anything.

    Why do the editors of Slashdot feel the need to spin stories so that the headlines read like it's actually news? Someone mentioned this to the press and suddenly it's headlines that they're doing it. Please don't fall victim to the ways of other news providers, that's why I read Slashdot because it's not using shock reporting to get my attention.

    Yahoo wants this. You're a tool if you print it like this.

    "Stay tuned for a very special local Fox affiliate news report about how just going to school can be harmful for your children. They may already be dead! Find out how at nine."

  • Blingo! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Xshare (762241)
    http://www.blingo.com/ [blingo.com] Lots of my friends and people who I've heard from have won from Blingo. No spyware, not too many adds. Just a google search with a win every so often. Seems to work for them.
    • How have you not yet realised that sites like this simply can't exist without being scams?
      • I've won a movie ticket from Blingo already. They're able to give stuff away because they add their own text advertisements (about 4 of them) to the top of your search results. From http://www.blingo.com/about [blingo.com]:

        How can Blingo afford to give away prizes?

        Just like other popular search engines, we earn money from the sponsored links you see when you do a search. (These links are always clearly identified and separated from search results.) Prizes are simply our way of encouraging people to use Blingo to sea

      • I've never tried Blingo until I saw the GP post. After having tried it, I'm impressed by the business concept. All that they do is show some Google AdSense advertisements above and below the regular Google search results -- Google has a program specifically for co-branded searches. To you, the end user, you still get Google "quality" results, although, the sponsored links are somewhat more prominent that on Google.com. Plus, you get an (admittedly small) chance of winning a prize.

        I would not be surpr
        • Ponzi schemes, affiliate links, 'sign up for this trial / give us personal info and get a free iPod shuffle', etc. have been around forever. There's a price for everything. Not to be harsh, but get a little common sense.
    • "You must live in the United States" to win a prize, according to their website.

      • Re:Blingo! (Score:4, Informative)

        by TheSpoom (715771) * <slashdot@ u b e r m 0 0 . n et> on Sunday February 12 2006, @06:25PM (#14701847) Homepage Journal
        Indeed, and they're certainly quite quiet about it if you don't read their Terms of Service. A friend of mine tried to get me to sign up after he was using it for a while, and I told him a few minutes later that we're both ineligible as we're Canadians. They'll certainly let you sign up and think you can win though...
          • Ah, cool, they've changed it then. That bold notice wasn't there previously (a few months ago I believe was when I was referred).
    • Yep, I've been using Blingo since last November. Have already won 3 $10 iTunes Gift Certificates (though one of them I won through my referral).

      http://www.krunk4ever.com/blog/?p=5 [krunk4ever.com]

      There are some caveats. Only your 1st 10 searches per day qualify for a win. For someone like me, that makes those 10 searches within the hour it strucks past midnight, it doesn't really give me any advantage to continue using Blingo after my initial 10 searches. Also, as more people join, the # of prizes and the frequency of the p

    • Re:Blingo! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rjrjr (28310)
      Why was this moderated down? Blingo is a legit site, and they're proof that this prizes-for-eyes models work on some scale. They're not a spam factory, they're not a ponzi scheme, they're not cheats in any way at all. You search, you get results, and occasionally you just might get a movie ticket, or an iPod.

      Full disclosure: they're friends of mine, but I have no business interest with them. Just immense respect.
  • Try A9 the amazon [amazon.com]search engine. You get a Pi/2 percent (1.57%)discount after a day or twos useage

    It is a wonderful search engine. It is based on Google for normal search but you can add extra panels and having it use diffferent vehichles.

    Doing a Wikipedia search concurrently with a general search is in my oppinion the best of both worlds.

    • >It is based on Google for normal search but you can
      >add extra panels and having it use diffferent vehichles.
      >

      Gosh, pluggable search-engine modules, what an innovative idea. Someone should tell Apple [wikipedia.org] or the Firefox people [tns.net] about this, perhaps they could implement it on the client. Then your choice of search engines would be entirely up to the user, rather than being selected from a range pre-picked from selected partners of the search site...

      • I use A9 purely for the pi/2 discount. I make sure to use it once or twice a week to keep my discount active. So in that sense they bought my eyeballs but it really has to be losing them money on me considering how much I shop on Amazon.

        I'm not sold on the interface for pretty much the reasons you mentioned. If they opened it up to anyone I wanted to add then the possibilities get more interesting. To be fair to A9 they do make it pretty easy to become an "option" if you format your output to them pr [a9.com]

  • Free trip to Guantanamo Bay (Score:5, Funny)

    by Average_Joe_Sixpack (534373) on Sunday February 12 2006, @03:35PM (#14701208)
    After you search for any keywords on the DHS watchlist.

  • iWon worked well for a brief period (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bigtrike (904535) on Sunday February 12 2006, @03:36PM (#14701209)
    I found iWon to actually be useful and relevant for a brief period of time during the boom. Like just about every other portal and search which died off, they seemed to give in to greed and sell top placements, making it worthless.

    I would attribute the brief success of iWon to it functioning well, rather than the gimmicks.

  • Frequent-users miles (Score:5, Interesting)

    by biocute (936687) on Sunday February 12 2006, @03:36PM (#14701210) Homepage
    This got me thinking -- Maybe instead of offering prizes (which one needs to win), why not offer frequent-searcher credits?

    So if you searched while logged in (then Yahoo! doesn't even need forever-cookie to track a user's activity), you will accumulate some credits and when you have reached certain threshold, you can exchange for things that you actually want.
    • So if you searched while logged in (then Yahoo! doesn't even need forever-cookie to track a user's activity), you will accumulate some credits and when you have reached certain threshold, you can exchange for things that you actually want.

      How long would it take to write a little bot to search for random stuff at a high rate giving a specific user all the credit? How long to create 10,000 accounts, all vectored through AOL since they're kind enough to obfuscate your IP address, and spread that searching o

    • During school, my friend tried one of those programs that gave you money for surfing with their program as it served up new ads, every minute or so, on the top 20% of the screen. And he was trying to sign up everyone up left and right as it was a pyramid program.

      Anyway, to trick the program he was surfing, he wrote a simple WinAPI program that moved the mouse every few seconds, perhaps later versions actually clicked on links, don't know.

      I think the most he ever got in a check was like $27 one month, but I
      • Search activities will certainly be stored on Yahoo!, but your comment got me thinking even further:

        These credits are awarded based on keywords. For example, searching "Google Rocks" might give you $0.00001, searching "Google Sucks" might give you $0.001.

        And this opens up marketing (not advertising) opportunities, where companies will bid for keywords to reward users who searched for them. It's almost like Google Adsense except this one rewards users who searched for them.
  • There's a difference between offering (as the headline implies) and considering offering as the article states. For all we know this could be the handiwork of some marketing droid who just ran a poll for a Powerpoint presentation.
  • Yahoo is also offering Chinese dinners as a prize. Dunno why.
  • frisk me - i've got a prize for ya
  • Mypoints.com *still* offers awards to folks that read their advertising emails. If I would just get off my butt more often and slog through what they send me, I could already have my fourth $10 restaurant gift certificate.
    • Yeah, but it's slowed way down. In my first year at mypoints, I earned enough for a $100 Sharper Image gift certificate. It took me two years (just clicking emails) to earn my most recent $20 gift certificate. Almost anything worth points these days requires a credit card.
  • Yahoo's survey said that users who sign up for the rewards program would be required to do most of their searching with the company. The program may require users to register, so the company can track usage, or use a Yahoo rewards toolbar.

    Not worth it. Let them track someone else. Then the next time the subpoena wagon rolls through town they can hang them, not me.

    qz

    • It's a feature rich contest though.

      Yahoo will automatically forward the price to your next of kin if you happen to be a Chinese dissident that they turn in.

      Screw Yahoo. Better to pull out of a market than get people killed for speaking up.

  • Firefox extensions.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by damneinstien (939730) on Sunday February 12 2006, @04:08PM (#14701332)
    If the search prize giving algorithm isn't too draconian, we might as well use an extension to search google and yahoo at the same time and use google's search while getting money from yahoo.
  • Wow, if I use Yahoo! I might get free Air Miles? What happened to what i was looking for.. A good e-mail account or search results?

  • Can they really be that clueless? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by YGingras (605709) <ygingras@ygingras.net> on Sunday February 12 2006, @04:19PM (#14701368) Homepage
    When I search for some keywords, I'm not after free music (unless the keywords are "free" and "music" of course), I'm after relevant search results. Unless Yahoo can feed me those (and they can't at the moment) no amount of free music will make them a usable search engine.
  • This was posted at C|Net three days ago.
    http://news.com.com/2061-10811_3-6037090.html [com.com]

    The C|Net article includes a screenshot showing what incentives Yahoo! is considering offering, as well as this text:

    Yahoo! is considering launching a program to reward people who make Yahoo! their primary search engine. Yahoo! Mail users will be given early access to this program. You will receive a monthly reward if you make Yahoo! your primary search engine. This means that most of the searching you do each month must be

  • I've had pretty good luck with the Blingo service (intentionally not posting my "affiliate" link, although it's in my .sig). They piggyback on Google's search results, and you basically have a chance to "win" randomly through each search of the day.

    Mostly, I've just found it to be a good way to pick up a couple free iTunes gift certificates :)

    I think that the model of accumulating "points" just ends up being more of a pain than it's worth.

  • When you have to pay people to use your free product, you have a serious marketing problem.
  • Maybe it could offer Chinese journalists Get Out of Jail Free cards [slashdot.org].

    P.

    • Another time honored marketing ploy to seduce/coerce personal information from customers. Dupe!
      Do you mean "duplicate story", or "the customers were duped"?
      • Negative points are given, not only to change the karma of registered users, but to filter the comments. Some readers will only read comments of +3 or higher for example, and by marking 'first' posts as first posts, people who don't want to see them, don't have to. With regards to the yahoo thing, I can't really see them attracting many users if they do go through with this. I only ever used Yahoo! search when I was logged into my mail account and it was easier than changing to google. If I was on any othe

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