Google’s Dominance Is Your Reward
If you have been paying attention to Tech news you will have noticed that the #1 and #2 Search players have been been making bids to buy the #3 player, Yahoo!
Essentially, Microsoft “Live” Search tried to buy up Yahoo! to better compete with Google’s undisputed #1 (and get advertisers back onboard).
That plan didn’t work. And now Microsoft is offering a rewards program to get more people to use MSN as their search engine (thus, today’s title).
“Sign up to start earning great perks just for searching!
Sign up for SearchPerks! and start earning tickets towards exciting prizes whenever you search the Web – up to 25 tickets per day. It’s free, easy t
o use, and your tickets accumulate as fast as you can search.*
And because SearchPerks! is brought to you by Microsoft Live Search, you know you won’t compromise quality while earning rewards.
Be sure to sign up before the registration deadline on December 31, 2008—the sooner you sign up, the more opportunity you have to earn tickets!”
I saw the ad for SearchPerks on my Hotmail page, and it includes a link, or you can click here to sign up.
Sign up and get 500 “bonus tickets”.
It smacks of desperation to me.
[note: to earn tickets, you must use Internet Explorer when you search, and download a small data collecting app.]
Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved.
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• About Tech Paul
I am a Retired computer & network technician. I used to think the machines were pretty cool. Now I don’t.
They’re anything but.
I regularly posted how-to’s and tricks & tips and general computing advice here starting in 2007. (Use the Search tool to find answers. But be aware, many are rather dated.) Sometimes I answered (your) specific questions in an article if I believed the answer was generally helpful to “everyone”. All the writing you see was my own, typos and all. There always is/was an implied “IMHO” in what you see here.
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Tech - for Everyone 
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIf you have been paying attention to Tech news you will have noticed that the #1 and #2 Search players have been been making bids to buy the #3 player, Yahoo! Essentially, Microsoft “Live” Search tried to buy up Yahoo! to better compete with Google’s undisputed #1 (and get advertisers back onboard). That plan didn’t work. And now Microsoft is offering a rewards program to get more people to use MSN as their search engine (thus, today’s title). “Sign up to start earning great perks just for searching! Sign up for SearchPerks! and start earning tickets towards exciting prizes whenever you search the Web – up to 25 tickets per day. It’s free, easy to use, and your tickets accumulate as fast as you can search.* And because SearchPerks! is brought to you by Microsoft Live Search, you know you won’t compromise quality while earning […] […]
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Hey Paul,
Those of us who prefer running FireFox, as our Internet Browser, are apparently out of luck. A condition of signing up for this scheme of Microsoft’s is the use of Internet Explorer.
Sounds to me as if MS is feeling the heat from the alternative Browser market, as well as Google.
BM
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Mr. Mullins–
Yes, you are correct; a condition for earning these “tickets” is that you use IE when you search. I will alter my article to reflect this fact.
Yes, I agree with your analysis as well. As you probably know, Microsoft is not the undisputed computing “monopoly” it once was. It has lost “market share” in every area.. with the possible exception of the enterprise server OS.
I actually think recent Microsoft offerings are better than what they were producing, but for a long time they stagnated and let others develop better products (which they would then buy up and slap the Microsoft logo on).
Now, Microsoft needs to revamp its pricing structure– drastically.
$200 for Office?! What for? Open Office and Google Docs are free! Just my humble opinion..
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Paul,
Now all we have to do is wait for someone to write a script that will do an endless and unattended loop of searches using MSN search engine and IE (LOL)… Wonder what the rewards will be?
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Rick–
I have not signed up for SearchPerks! and installed the little applet that goes along with it, so I don’t know this for certain, but I suspect there’s a chaptcha involved to (try to) prevent such an abuse.
However you’re absolutely correct in your premise– if there is a ‘system’, someone will go to a lot of effort to try to find a way to “work the system” for their own gain. (And I have heard that Microsoft is a favorite target of the tech-savvy of this type!)
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