Mighty Bargain Hunter

Earn free Visa gift cards for searching the web

July 23rd, 2008 | by mbhunter |

I’m not just talking about “pay per search” sites loaded with drug, casino, and asbestos links.  I’m talking about getting free Visa gift cards for searching for the same terms — on the same sites — you probably would anyway.

Darren Rowse plurked about a new social search engine called Scour today.  At the basic level it aggregates search query results from the top search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, putting the best results overall at the top of the list.  That’s pretty standard.

The main differences I see with Scour though are these:

• Users of Scour can directly affect the search results by voting them up or down, and by commenting on them.  The major search engines are amazingly good at what they do but algorithms ultimately can only go so far.  Putting humans in the mix stands to make the search results better.
• Users of Scour can interact with other users who have similar tastes in search.  I’m not sure how useful this is but if you can meet another person who likes getting great deals at paintball auctions, why not say hello?
• Users of Scour can get paid.  Free gift cards to specific merchants are great, but free Visa gift cards are about as close to cash as you can get.  These cards are accepted anywhere Visa is accepted, as far as I know.  More on this below.

The developers behind Scour put quite a bit of thought into the interface.  Using Scour is very intuitive, and I think this will help a lot of people continue using it.

You can go directly to the website and enter your search, or you can download a toolbar for the most popular browsers (more browsers to come later).  My best choice so far is the Firefox Searchbar plugin that I found in the “Goodies” section of Scour.  This adds Scour to the dropdown box with Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc.  That’s really low-key, and it doesn’t take up any extra screen real estate.  A similar plugin is available currently for IE and Opera.  (I don’t install the entire toolbar, just the searchbar plugin.)

Leaving a comment about a site is also really easy.  After visiting the site, a comment and voting bar pops on the bottom of the screen.  Here, if you like, you can give the site a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, and make a comment on the site.  It’s all right there, and it’s a piece of cake.  Your feedback about the site is fed into the search algorithm for Scour, and will incrementally improve the search results that Scour delivers for everybody.

Now, for the get paid part.  You get 150 points just for signing up.  Each search counts 1 point, each vote counts 2 points 1 point, and each comment counts 3 points 1 point.  You can get up to 4 3 points per unique search each day, and up to 500 300 points total each day from your own searching, voting, and commenting.  If you refer friends to Scour, you get 25% of the points that they earn.

(UPDATE 30 August 2008:  The following payout values are only good for users in certain countries: US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland and Spain.  Other regions have a reduced payout structure.  Additionally, the maximum points per day from search activities was reduced to 300.  See the Scour blog for details.)

Points currently convert to Visa gift cards as follows:

• 6,500 points = $25 gift card
• 12,500 points = $50 gift card
• 25,000 points = $100 gift card

So, Scour probably won’t replace your income.  Earning 500 300 points in one day would take a while, and you’d probably set off their radar if you tried to earn 500 300 points by yourself too efficiently.  Even if you could do 500 300 points per hour legitimately, you’d be earning a whopping less than $2 per hour.  Not exactly the road to riches.  But I view programs like Scour in the same light as I view MyPoints — it’s a nice bonus that rolls around once in a while for doing something that you’re accustomed to doing for free.  It’s possible to earn enough points to get a $25 gift card in a few months by leisurely searching.

This is a brand-new program so their service still remains to be demonstrated, but it looks solid enough that I recommend giving Scour a try.  If I (or anyone else) earns enough to get a gift card I’ll be sure to report how it went.