3 ms·
At one point, MS were paying people to use Bing. Their loss was probably in a large part due to marketing it aggressively (see: that horrendous "Bing it" produc
by blueskin_ 12y ago
At one point, MS were paying people to use Bing. Their loss was probably in a large part due to marketing it aggressively (see: that horrendous "Bing it" product placement in whetever TV show it was), while DuckDuckGo/startpage spread mostly by word of mouth, and Yahoo maintains market share via inertia (and shady third party referral deals that cause malware to often change your search engine to yahoo, but that's another discussion...).
- Amezarak 12y agoThey still are. Sign in with a Microsoft or Facebook account and you accumulate Bing points which can then be redeemed for Amazon gift cards or various other things. This is actually the main reason I use Bing; if search engines are going to track me I might as well get paid for it. The search results are usually as good or better than Google; YMMV. It's very rare I have to resort to a Google search and when I do it's usually just as bad.
- hollerith 12y agoHow many dollars of gift-card credit do you receive in a year?
- Amezarak 12y agoRoughly $60/year. You can do better but I don't go out of my way to do the extra searches (I don't change my workflow for it), and I sometimes throw the points away on relatively useless things like sweepstakes and Skype subscriptions.
- freehunter 12y agoI use Bing because they pay me as well. I don't go for the money, I typically use my point on gift-like things. For example, for the holidays I used them on the photos printed on metal or glass, which is worth more than the $5 gift card I could have gotten instead. I also do a lot of sweepstakes entries; I've never won, but meh it's free anyway.