I’m still not convinced whether I like this or not. It’s cool that they offer prizes for searching, but is it really necessary? And what are their motives behind this? Do they collect data, and supply this data to advertisers? Or use it for some other means?
Here is how Blingo works:
- Blingo randomly seeds winning times into their system
- If you happen to search at the right time, you win. There is no registration required, except if you actually win.
- Tell Blingo where you live, or where to send your prize.
There have been over 15,584 winners since March 30, 2005 when they launched. There is a winner’s side bar on the site that gives the stats for winners for the day and over time as well. Pretty neat idea. Would just like more details on it though. Is there some kind of catch here?
The Alexa traffic rank for Blingo is 6,938, so they are getting some visitors.(Comparison - Traffic Rank for weblogsinc.com - 5,061, Google.com - 3, start.com - 13,890, yahoo.com - 1).
Does anyone have any experiences with using Blingo? Has anyone won? I currently have not found anyone that has actually had any experience with this browser. But with free giveaways, it could be a great spot for some E-Marketing, and Brand exposure.
1. I just blogged about Yahoo's similar efforts. Reward-driven search makes total sense if you make one assumption: Search is a commodity. That is even more the case with this site, which is built on Google's API.
To my mind, this is the future.
Posted at 1:08PM on Feb 12th 2006 by Jim Kerr