Friday, February 24th, 2006, 6:07 am
Search Engines ‘Bribe’ Users
Filed under: 
The Wall Street Journal has taken an overview on per-for-use campaigns, which have become the norm among search engines.
Microsoft Corp. launched a campaign last week
offering $1 million in prizes…
…to users of its MSN search engine…roughly a cent to a charity of the user’s
choice every time a search is conducted on
its Yahoo-based search engine……Amazon.com Inc. offers regular users of
its A9 search engine a 1.57% discount on
most Amazon.com purchases…… Blingo.com, powered by Google, gives
away prizes like iPods and movie tickets
to lucky users who happen to search at
random times…
Users are getting paid to get served (and absorb advertisements in the process). In due time, this builds up loyalty and dependency. Yahoo offer many other benefits, which are not mentioned in this article. Google rewards people for using Firefox, which is a separate-yet-related matter altogether.
