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The Internet Businesses Yahoo!

Yahoo Considers Offering Prizes to Search Users 100

Posted by Zonk from the you-get-porn-and-free-music dept.
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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Yahoo Considers Offering Prizes to Search Users More

Yahoo Considers Offering Prizes to Search Users

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  • Another Spin to Grab Attention (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Sunday February 12, 2006 @04:25PM (#14701161) Journal
    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 know people probably aren't going to believe this, or they're going to say that I'm working for the company or something, but I have won something from Blingo. It was only a free movie ticket, but it is proof that it's not a scam.

      • Re:Blingo! (Score:2, Informative)

        by masterren ( 733946 )
        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

    • Re:Blingo! (Score:2, Informative)

      by innocent_white_lamb ( 151825 )
      "You must live in the United States" to win a prize, according to their website.
    • 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.
    • I have won a few times on this site. It kicks butt
  • 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...

    • Re:A9 amazon discount (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Can you sue them because Pi/2% of a price is uncalculable and is rounded somehow in their calculation?

  • Full List of Prizes (Score:1, Informative)

    by MikeSty ( 890569 )
    Searching for online rewards

    Yahoo is considering free offers, discounts and rewards to users of its search engine. Here are some of the possible incentives listed in a recent survey of Yahoo's customers:

    Five free music downloads per month

    Donations to charity (of users' choice)

    Unlimited Yahoo mail storage (instead of 1 GB)

    Discounted personals (one free month and $19.95 per month thereafter, instead of $24.95)

    Frequent-flier miles (250 per month)

    Source: Chronicle research

  • no thanks. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And support Yahoo turning over people to the authorities? No thanks!

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

    by Average_Joe_Sixpack ( 534373 ) on Sunday February 12, 2006 @04:35PM (#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 @04:36PM (#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.
    • Yes, the gimmicks were definitely their downfall.

      I never used it myself, but my Dad had actually signed up with them, I guess thinking that he was surely the next big-money winner. I had no idea what iWon was all about, until I ran AdAware on his machine, and turned up some 400+ tracking cookies--from iWon alone. All in all there were 678 objects (the number still stands out in my head!), who knows how many of the extras were precipitated from 'registering' with iWon's advertisers.

      I hope Yahoo! has differen

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

    by biocute ( 936687 ) on Sunday February 12, 2006 @04:36PM (#14701210)
    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.
    • If the search activity was stored on the user's computer, wouldn't it be relatively easy to alter it? There sure is a lot of incenive.
      • 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.
    • 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

  • "considering"! (Score:2, Redundant)

    by Quixote ( 154172 ) *
    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.

  • Chinese dinners (Score:3, Funny)

    by kitzilla ( 266382 ) <paperfrog@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Sunday February 12, 2006 @04:39PM (#14701225) Homepage Journal
    Yahoo is also offering Chinese dinners as a prize. Dunno why.
  • This would be an excellent market strategy if you made little profit in the first place. However, for an already successful company like google, this would only cut into their revenue. I see this only as a desperate attempt by yahoo to save their market share.
  • I remember the last time I bought a certain brand of coffee, my decision to pick up the particular brand was influenced by the free ceramic mug that came with it. There was a equally better coffee brand sitting besides this one but I chose the one with the free gift.

    This is one of the oldest tricks in the marketing field. The companies doing business are clever in taking advantage of this human weakness. That is exactly what is happening in the internet arena too. And yahoo is leading the way in pulling pot
  • but that headline seems to imply that prizes are being offered to people willing to search Yahoo users. How thorough of a search do I have to perform, and do they have a suggested list of users? Will a basic pat-down and frisk be enough, or do I have to get a flashlight and gloves? Inquiring minds want to know.

  • go'head (Score:2, Funny)

    by voudras ( 105736 )
    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.
    • I still do this as well. I occasionally do purchase through them, so am a decent customer and still receive approximately 60 emails a month from them. I filter them and save them for the weekend so I can click through them all at one time. I've returned $200 in Circuit City gift certificates over the years and am close to getting another $50. I've slowed down because I started using fatwallet.com because of the direct return, but if MyPoints has a ProFlowers deal or the like and I was going to buy flowers f

  • Not worth it (Score:2, Interesting)

    by qzulla ( 600807 )
    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 @05:08PM (#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.
    • Hmm... might actually be one of the things they're trying to do: increase chances of assimilation. Instead of sticking to Google, you might once in a while check Yahoo to see if you won. They're hoping you might even find some good hits/useful search options.
    • This is probably exactly what I'd do. I might even make up bogus searches and randomly click whatever comes up in hopes that I might get some free stuff. However, in doing so, I will be exposed to advertising, which is what makes a search engine profitable.

  • FREE Air Miles? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by immorak ( 904819 )
    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 @05:19PM (#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

  • If Yahoo is successful, maybe Google will consider this...

    Since Verizon is trying to get Google to pay for use of their network (I don't agree with this happening, but for the sake of the argument keep reading), maybe they could consider becoming partners and Google could offer a free month of DSL through Verizon as one of the incentives...which could possibly bring more Google users to Verizon as customers...

    If this happens, I better get credit for the idea.
  • Did Yahoo! just jump the shark?
  • 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.

  • I was prompted, just two days ago, to fill out a survey from Yahoo! about their services. Part of it asked about whether I used Yahoo search as my primary search engine, and if not why.

    I explained that I used Google b/c I trust Google, and I don't trust Yahoo. But now that they may bribe me to use their service, I may change my mind. Nothing inspires trust like a kickback.

  • When you have to pay people to use your free product, you have a serious marketing problem.
  • Another offer to get crap I'll never use and end up giving away just to be free of having to maintain it!

    Consumerism....the evil that enslaves you.
  • Maybe it could offer Chinese journalists Get Out of Jail Free cards [slashdot.org].

    P.

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