Swagbucks

There’s been a lot of talk around the blogosphere about Swagbucks lately.

What exactly is Swagbucks?

Swagbucks is a search engine. On some searches you will randomly earn Swagbucks which are a their point system. Swagbucks can be redeemed for prizes; a $5 Amazon gift card costs 45 Swagbucks. It took me about a month of normal searching to earn enough for one $5 Amazon gift card.

Is Swagbucks worth using?

Maybe or maybe not.

My experience with it is that it works fine for very simple searches, like if you know the name of a site but you can’t remember if it’s .com or .org or .net.

For more specific searches where you’re looking for less obvious information, I find that Swagbucks is not a good search engine. Here are a few reasons:

It’s “Did you mean” suggestions are down right stupid. On Google.com, these suggestions are very helpful and tend to correct spelling errors. On Swagbucks, these suggestions are the opposite of helpful and often want to turn correct spelling wrong.
You only get 4 or 5 pages of search results. So if you know what you’re searching for will come up on the first page then it’s useful, if you’re not sure where what you’re looking for will show up then you likely won’t ever find it with Swagbucks.
It doesn’t have a maps feature. I frequently do searches for city names to find out where they’re located and Swagbucks can’t seem to handle that sort of search at all. The last search I did for a city name got me a link to funeral home locations.
In addition to a maps feature, it is also lacking the stock quote and unit conversion features that Google has and I use on a regular basis.

So will I continue using Swagbucks or not?

For basic searching yes, I have the Swagbucks search bar plugin for Firefox so it’s easy to make a first attempt with it and earn those Amazon gift cards. But, I also still have my Firefox homepage set to Google.com so I can easily press the home button in my browser and do any more intensive searching.