Type of engine: Sweepstakes, oh and general web search.
Overall: Put it this way: it’s all about winning the prizes. It’s not that the search is bad, but the results are directly from Gigablast so I don’t know that it’s worthwhile rating Blingo’s relevancy. As far as I could tell there’s no difference at all from the Gigablast results.
Relevancy of results: Same as Gigablast, and I need to do a review of them.
Features and functionality: Average. There’s not much to it other than a search box and pictures of the prizes you can win.
Quality of help and “about us†pages: The “about us†pages are all about winning prizes. I couldn’t find anything search related.
Business model: Lure users in with free prizes, and then show them Google ads.
INTRO
Blingo just released a press release today so I thought I’d be right on top of things by doing a brief review for the Lounge. Blingo uses Gigablast’s results so I won’t spend too much time evaluating the relevancy. That’s best left to a Gigablast review.
The prizes are a one year Netflix subscription, a digital camera, a digital video recorder, an iPod, a $250 Amazon gift certificate, movie passes, and a Sony music gift certificate. Just go to their site, start searching, and hope you’re one of the random winners. (I hope I win an iPod.)
No registration is required unless you win something. So you can just go to Blingo and search. That’s different, if I remember correctly, from iWon, where you had to register. They provide “see also†links that are taken from Gigablast and formatted differently. And there’s a “did you mean†suggestion taken directly from Gigablast.
I searched for Oakland public library and there were four Google ads that went more than halfway down the page. I tried coniferous trees of North America and got the same thing. And both of those queries are non-commercial in my book. But it’s not exactly surprising for a site like this. I should say that the results for both of these queries were good enough that it’s not a waste of time to search on Blingo.
If you like Gigablast, you might as well use Blingo. Same results, and you can win prizes. So stop reading this and go win a prize.
