Microsoft Bing Rewards crowd-sources the work of falsifying metrics.
This simple feature hack could cost Microsoft as much as ~$90 /user/year, and is likely damaging the Bing search eco-system. It only takes about 10 minutes per day and almost no active work.
I came across Microsoft Bing’s rewards site the other day, and discovered that Bing was actually offering rewards for search. This struck me as odd as I had only previously seen this on gamified sites like PCH, and not any real search engines. Perhaps Microsoft wanted to indulge in the revenue-sharing paradigm, or more realistically expected this feature would create:
- Long time stickyness/exposure to Bing.
- Hoping users would click on Bing Ads.
- Search metrics
Regardless of their reason, I was intrigued and signed up for a new hotmail account (throwback to late 90s). When I logged in, I realized I could earn up to 25 points per day for searching on PC and mobile.
This was pretty dead simple. I could search for almost anything on Bing (i.e. “Awooga”, “sup”) and as long as I was logged in, I would get daily credits. I was searching for things I would have never searched for, and realized this is stupid; let me automate this.
I spent about 10 minutes automating daily searches with a little JS script before I quickly realized that there was probably nothing deeply innovative about this. I searched for Bing rewards and realized 2 out of the 8 first results were actually automated bing rewards bots.
I used the pogocheats website to automate my web search. I began at 11:18, and it finished 30 searches at 11:23 (~5 minutes). I checked back on the Bing rewards site, and voila I was awarded my points of the day. Pogocheats also seemed to work fine on Android Mobile, so I finished my daily mobile search quota in another ~5 minutes.
I had just made my 25 daily points. So, what does 25 points account for?
Let’s assume it costs worst-case ~525 points for a $5 gift card. By earning 25 points a day, I can earn a $5 Amazon gift card every ~21 days. This means that I can earn 17 gift cards over a year. Even if Amazon provides Microsoft an amazing, un-heard of 20% discount, Microsoft would pay ~$68 dollars a year for mostly bogus search results.
The numbers would more realistically be around 5% discount with 475 points needed for every $5 gift card, resulting in ~$90 per year. Paying for user search is more damaging than just the (~68–90$) cost per user per year. However, Bing is probably aware of this. When I checked the various Bing Bot sites, I noticed a lot of them had copious amounts of traffic according to Alexa and ComScore. What this implies is that the Bing Rewards program is really damaging for the search eco-system as it falsifies market share and creates tons of bogus queries.
Not sure how long the Rewards Program will last, or what percentage of Bing Rewards users are actually performing real searches, but take advantage of it while it lasts.
