Blingo Made Me A Winner

I’m one of those people that rarely wins anything. So, last night while doing a search on Blingo for ‘South Dakota State Parks’ when I was told that I won a $25 Visa Gift Card, I was pretty excited. Just ask my wife. Twenty-five bucks isn’t a lot — the next person that won got a $100 Visa Gift Card — but it sure made me glad that I’ve been using Blingo for all of my online searching the last six months. In fact, I won exactly six months to the day I joined which is a bit weird come to think of it.

But I’ve kept you in suspense…just what is Blingo anyway? Blingo is a search engine built around results from Google. So, if you normally use Google, you’re going to get the same quality of results when you use Blingo. The major difference is Blingo gives away prizes at random times throughout the day. They support the gift giving with revenue from clickthroughs on Google ads, of which they run fewer than Google. If all the paid ads on Google bother you, the Blingo interface is much cleaner and drops the sidebar text ads entirely.

After signing up and creating an account, you can invite friends to join you on Blingo. If a friend you’ve brought wins a prize, you win the same prize. It is fairly easy with most browsers to change the default search engine, which makes playing Blingo that much easier. I doubt I’d use it if I had to manually type in the URL everytime. By setting the default search engine to Blingo, you are free to go about your online activity without changing any bit of your routine. Blingo offers help and instructions for doing this for most of the major browsers.

I had my doubts when I first ran across Blingo, but it appears to be working for them. They’ve given away over 24,000 prizes and recently Publishers Clearing House partnered with them to expand the range of prizes (could I finally win the $10,000,000?) given away. Blingo has done a wonderful job making it easy to switch by choosing to use the most popular search engine results. Personally, I’ve grown fond of the look and feel of Blingo in comparison to Google, it almost makes Google look cluttered.

Now, go win something.