MSN's search and win
If Blingo can
do, why not MSN! In fact Blingo's business model is based on
handing out attractive freebies for using their search engine.
And although while searching on Blingo you get to see its logo
and other details at the top and bottom of the page, the search
results are all from Google. Being a 'partner site', Blingo
supposedly gets revenues from Google, of which a part goes to
finance the cost of freebies.
So in a way, it's almost like Google offering prizes to use its
search engine, albeit through proxy. But Blingo is not alone.
Though not official, Amazon is known to offer discounts on its products for using
its A9 search engine for more than a year.
Yet when MSN unveiled its 'search and
win' plan, it's seen as an act of desperation. In this article, Mike Musgrove
quotes Nielsen-NetRatings recent findings that MSN is not only
trailing Google and Yahoo! (in that order) in gross web
searches, it's share also slipped from 14% a year back to 10.9%.
Juxtapose MSN's offer for freebies and Yahoo!'s admission of barely holding onto its share, it's
clear that Google's juggernaut is here to roll, no matter what
comes on way.
What indeed goes to Google's credit is that the range of
top-class products it's been launching for awhile has completely
washed away whatever counter-strategy its competitors have
thought of.
Coming back to MSN's offer, it proved sour for me for the
freebies aren't for non-US citizens. How very sad!