Bing - Search to Earn Credits

In case you haven't heard of it, Bing is Microsoft's search engine. It is a re-vamped and re-branded MSN Search. If you've never used it, it's actually pretty decent. It provides results that are on par with Google's in my opinion, and it's definitely improving. If you want to try a side by side comparison I suggest trying out Bing It On. I tried several search results on there and was surprised to see Bing come out the winner in 3 out of 5 of them, and the other 2 were ties.

As an incentive to use their search engine, Microsoft has started a rewards program. To sign up, you link either your Facebook or Microsoft account. When you first start out, there is a "tour" you can take of Bing with various different things to click on that all reward credits. After that though, the main way to earn credits is through searching. You get 1 credit per 2 searches up to a maximum of 15 credits per day (20 when you get your status to gold). There is also a "daily offer" which is basically just a special search, but you get an extra credit when you click it.

There are not a whole lot of rewards to choose from, but it's very easy to cap your credits each day. Just head over to the Bing rewards page and click the daily offer. From there, just click on different related searches on the side until you get your credits for the day. The best reward is probably the $5 Amazon gift card. You can see in my screen shot that I had 76% of the needed 525. Since I took that I have cashed in for my $5 card which I received the next day and I am now 12% towards my second card.

There are 3 status levels - member, silver, and gold. Getting to silver and gold is easy, but it takes a little bit of time. There really isn't a benefit of silver over member except for a one time 50 credit bonus. Gold however gets 5% discount on Microsoft points, 5% discount on Xbox Gold subscription, and a 10% discount on all other items. So that $5 Amazon card that used to cost 525 credits becomes 475 credits.

Again, like several other methods I've talked about, you aren't going to be making a ton of money from this. However; it's easy, doesn't take a lot of time out of your day (2 - 3 minutes usually), and you get a free Amazon gift card every few weeks.