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Blingo Search Engine Offers Prizes To Users

December 8th, 2004 by GuestColumnist | 29 Comments

Blingo Search Engine Offers Prizes To Users

Blingo is a new search engine offering users something extra along with their search results. Every time users search on Blingo, they also have a chance to win a prize instantly. Don’t confuse Blingo with Plinko, the Price is Right game where we all enjoyed seeing Barker’s Beauties leaning over to toss chips down the bouncing pegged wall. Blingo is not the first search engine to offer prizes and rewards for searching, IWon (an Ask Jeeves owned site) started the trend years ago.

As Blingo users search for words or phrases they get a chance to instantly win prizes like a Canon digital camera, a one-year subscription to Netflix, an Amazon.com gift certificate, or a music CD. Blingo says “There’s no user registration, no spam, no annoying pop-up ads, and no catch to win — just instant search, instant entry, and instant gratification.”

Over the last few years, all of the major search providers — Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others — have all adopted similar search technologies, so users are finding very little difference between the search results on these popular sites. “Google really raised the bar for search quality. Now everybody is looking for new and compelling ways to differentiate the search experience,” explained Blingo co-founder and CEO Frank Anderson. “Sweepstakes and contests have always been enormously popular with consumers, even though there are typically some strings attached. But with Blingo we’ve eliminated all of the usual nonsense. There are no strings, no catches, and no hassles — just great search and thousands of winners.”

Blingo was founded by Frank Anderson and Rob Davis who previously launched iAmaze, an Internet company acquired by AOL in 2000. Blingo, backed by venture capital investor Athlon Ventures , is pursuing a similar business model to other leading search providers. The company receives revenue from advertiser-sponsored links correlated to specific search queries, and then gives a portion of the revenue back to users in the form of prizes.

“Blingo does not need to re-invent the search wheel because we can provide a great search experience via partnerships,” said Rob Davis, Blingo co-founder and Vice President of Engineering. “Our search quality is very similar to other search engines. Our challenge is to deliver rewards in the most consumer-friendly manner possible. Now users can choose to ’search and find’ with other search engines — or ’search, find, and possibly win’ with Blingo. And there’s no better way to search for holiday gift ideas this month — search on Blingo and you may win a gift of your own.”




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