Blingo gives away prizes to its visitors. Sound familiar? iwon did this years ago when they gave away millions and later, after the bubble, gave away bikes and other such prizes. iwon, which is now owned by Ask Jeeves now gives away thousands.

So what does blingo have to offer? What is their business model?

Well, their search results are powered by Google. Their PPC ads (how I imagine they primarily make their money) is also powered by google. So what other benefits do they add? Well, they give you the ability to sign up and “refer” others and if those others win, you get the same prize. Sounds kind of like a pyramid scheme…I’d like the increased chances of winning but if anyone ever spammed/gave away my info because they wanted to increase their chances, I’d cut them off :-) They also offer a much cleaner/simpler design than iwon’s. Their prizes are much smaller…gift certificates, ipod shuffles & minis, movies, etc.

But do you know what the worst thing is about Blingo? The fact that they are taking part in the Google 302 exploit which hijacks the SEO benefits from target sites to boost their traffic :-(

$ telnet www.blingo.com 80
Trying 207.97.206.18…
Connected to web1.blingo.com (207.97.206.18).
Escape character is ‘^]’.
HEAD /external-result/http://www.forbes.com/finance/mktguideapps/compinfo/C ompanyTearsheet.jhtml?tkr=IACI HTTP/1.1
Host: www.blingo.com

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 17:47:23 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.6b
Location: http://www.forbes.com/finance/mktguideapps/compinfo/CompanyTearsheet.j HTML?tkr=IACI
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

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