Marketing Confetti by Jasginder Singh

Now loyalty programs in search engine
Thursday, July 24, 2008

With information gaining vital importance in our daily lives, many people have started saying that we have entered an information age since last few years. IT companies are covering the distance between zero and billion in the shortest time for any company. The media has seen a bursting high in last decade as information has never been so easy to interchange, and when information is bombarded in our lives so heavily the next major thing is searching for the right information. So stress has been lately on how to structure the information, index it, make relationships between various information units so as to have a meaningful search. To reach this we need heuristic information, where the 'thumb of rules' are identified from experience.

We have seen search engine in text form changing to clusters and tags. But now a new search engine called Scour has been launched to encourage and reward consumers to vote and comment on search results called up from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. taking clues from popular site Digg, Scour allows its (human) members to evaluate, vote on, and comment on the results they receive from the usual major search engines like Yahoo, Google and MSN. Those votes and comments are then available to others in the Scour.com community to help them decide which results are likely to be most useful or trustworthy.

Scour differentiates itself from other social search, rating and community web sites in that it allows its users vote and comment on search results, provides absolute privacy control, gives weight to each user's preferred search engines, and allows members to redeem their search points for Visa gift cards. By associating itself with Visa, it has entered the well established Loyalty domain.

Points scheme:
* Searching: 1 point;
* Voting: 2 points;
* Commenting: 3 points;
* Friend referral: 25% of each friend's points.

In a scenario cited by Scour.com, an average of 4.5 searches per day could translate into rewards worth as much as US$25 per year. And, when adding in the value of friend referrals with an average of 3 searches per day for each friend, 25 friends who sign up and use Scour.com regularly could earn the original member up to an additional US$100 or more each year.

"We're not trying to provide users with an alternative income, but the Scour points programme is a good way for us to reward users for helping to build up the community, to refine search results beyond the ordinary algorithms," concluded Yomtobian. Scour.com is owned and operated by ABCSearch, a part of Internext Media Corporation.

You can visit the search engine at http://scour.com

Labels: Loyalty Programs, Marketing Practices, New Trends