Microsoft's cunning plan to make Bing the leading search engine: Bribery The uptake for Microsoft's long-suffering search engine, Bing, continues to be so dismal that Redmond has resorted to paying people to use it. The "loyalty scheme" offers points that can be exchanged for charity donations or music, games, devices and other stuff on the Microsoft Store. Users are awarded three points per search …
This is just crying out for a small app that hits the search engine on your behalf while not actually bothering you with the results. A smart one would scan the news for trending keywords and then go look them up. Paying people for traffic is going to end up like the click fraud for advertising or the Facebook like farms.
"My concern with duckduckgo is that I haven't been able to find out where the money comes from."
They come from search-relevant advertising, so Key-word Ads. Ex: you search for "car rental", you get stuff like "Avis Rentals Car" for Ads.
https://techboomers.com/t/how-does-duckduckgo-make-money
So Microsoft's great idea is to pay users to do fake Bing searches just to get rewards, because that's exactly what they'll do, or some bright spark will write a script to do it automatically. Just random rubbish fed into Bing to try and make a few quid (so yes, that will be rubbish in, rubbish out).
Look Microsoft, Google have search tied up and locked away. Win10 may feed Bing, but that's only because you gave away 300m copies. Win10S will force users to Edge/Bing even more, unless they all end up in landfill like RT did (I know where my bets lay...)
As fas as I'm concerned, Bing is all glitz and nothing of substence, like Bling, Shiny, shiny and totally useless.
Are MS getting this desparate?
Oh well, Bling will get lots and lots of users when Windows 10S rolls out to the unsuspecting user base. IT only allows Edge and Bing.
To be fair Bing is much less worse than it used to be. So if people do ever want to use it it will probably get the same result as Google. And the outcome will be carefully collected by either to sell off to advertisers. Maybe using a selection, to at least obfuscate our lives, is the best way forward. DuckDuckGo for sensitive things, Bing for things you want to buy and Google for technical stuff, maybe. Or just select randomly.
Andrew Silver must have pricked a thumb and fallen asleep for a very long time; this scheme has been active for at least a year, probably longer, likely much longer. I tried it out. I got an Amazon voucher. I signed in with another email address and amassed two sets of points. Then did the same for a third email address. I got three Amazon vouchers. Then I was banned for being naughty. Oh well. It was just a giggle to see how far I could push it without robotizing and I felt like an outlaw. They also banned my wife. I got mega frowny points for that.
You're just "starting to think" that - you can't have been coming here for very long. Some of these people are so dedicated that they could get their windows/apple bait from an article about charcoal burning in the middle ages.
Oh noes - I mentioned the "a" word - that will have tripped the fanboi baiters radar and they will be along in a minute to tell us why Steve Jobs was the spawn of satan.
I've got a Silver Vulture Badge. That's how long I've been coming here. You have to stop hating the haters and start looking at them the same way you look at baby alligators. Sure, they look at you like they want to eat you so bad, but they're still cute as buttons on a little blue sailor suit. Enjoy life. It's all there is!
Didn't they fail at bribing people to use Bing before?
Actually its their tried and tested approach - be last to the party, try and muscle in and force their way, then completely fail to deliver what users want. There are so many stories through history of where they have done this.
If it were and odd product here and there, then you could let them off as being unlucky or something, but the more they do it, the more it can be confirmed as pure incompetence or a complete lack of understanding of people's needs..
Swear I'm literally the sole user of Bing. I honestly quite like it. Must do 95% Bing, 5% Google.
One perk is that the rest of my team naturally all use Google exclusively, so when we're all "Googling" an error message or symptom of a Major Incident I'll often have at least something different, and sometimes more accurate than everyone else.
Diversity and choice is a good thing, particularly now Bing doesn't totally suck compared to Google,
I use it too, and agree it can often come up with the best solution quicker than Google; often it will have the solution in a code block on the page so you don't even have to click any search results.
And thanks to the rewards, I haven't paid for Xbox Live Gold in over 2 years and been collecting 4+ games/month free.
Who remembers a toolbar that launched in the 90's called AllAdvantage? I remember it taking up quite a hefty portion of the top of my screen to show me ads whilst online and they sent you a cheque when you'd reached a certain amount. It was reasonably generous too and even better when coupled with the 0800 dial in numbers that sprang up back then. Didn't last unfortunately. So what Microsoft is doing is nothing new. I'm surprised no-one to my knowledge has tried to make AllAdvantage work again to get guaranteed eyeballs on ads and be upfront with the kind of people who'd be happy to do it and just pay them a decent amount to get on with it. People want more for their loyalty these days and I can't be bothered with what they are offering.
I remember it, it was the only ad-bar that actually paid me. I had multiple monitors back then and filled 1 of them with all the ad-bars I had signed up for (maybe 15 of them), using the 0800 number for dial up, would leave it running 24/7 using the mouse wiggler to keep them from timing out.
"How about no...." - Quite.
In addition, MS know this will be gamed, it's just a cheap ploy so they can say to advertisers "Look at all this lovely traffic, give money now please". It just shows the level of contempt they have for their advertising customers. Could it be they have the same level of contempt for their other customers?
Look, Microsoft, I don't know about others but I just can't bring myself to use a service with a name as stupid as 'Bing'. It reminds me too much of a microwave oven dishing me up a quick and nasty ready meal, which unfortunately is too close to the reality of the poor quailty of your search results.
And in addition to this, I'm now aware of how much personal data you're syphoning from Windows 10 users (via Cortana) to feed your search engine. I don't want to have anything to do with it thanks.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
