A web agency weblog

University of Illinois graduate Frank Anderson is the mind behind Blingo, a new search engine, powered by Google results, that is offering random prizes to people searching the Web.

The idea is actually simple, you only need to search as usual and could be randomly selected to win any of the following:

• Sony PlayStation Portable video game system
• Apple iPod Nano, 2GB digital music player
• Toshiba or Samsung portable DVD player with 7″ screen
• Apple iPod Shuffle, 512MB digital music player
• iTunes Gift Certificate or Movie Ticket Certificates

You can also cash your prizes and get Visa gift cards instead. The selection of prizes varies each month.

With Blingo you get the power of Google results plus the opportunity to win. The site and business model seems legit and I read they have some kind of partnership with Google.

I think Blingo is using the incentives to get attention and maybe introduce new services, paid ones?, in the future. Could the Adsense revenue be enough to cover the cost of the prizes they are giving away?, maybe, they could have done the math and get it working, time will tell.

Currently Blingo is open just for US residents and you don’t need to enter any personal information to join, just when winning and you’re limited to 10 qualifying searches per day.

One of the things I like is that you can refer friends and if one of them wins a prize you also win, there is no limit to how many friends you can invite and of course you should respect the usual terms of services: no spamming, no fake accounts, etc.

Could Blingo be the next kind of FreeIpods like sites? I don’t know, but this only demonstrates that there are many more online business models to be discovered.

Give it a try, this is my Blingo link: