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!