Swagbucks & The Search For Swag

A person I met on Ciao - he has a good rep, does good reviews - told me about Swagbucks. Now, I'd heard of it in the past - and may have even checked it out - but for whatever reason, I never signed up. It's a gift-card website (like MyPoints) that also offers prizes you can "buy" directly with your points. He said he'd gotten his gift card and it didn't take too long (unlike my months-long estimates about MyPoints) so I decided to sign up and try it out.

I started yesterday with 3 Swagbucks. As of today, I have 6. My goal is 45, to get a $5.00 Amazon gift card. I don't know what the hell I can buy with $5.00 (maybe pay for shipping for something) but that's not the point. The point is to find out if it's possible to get it, how long it takes, if it's possible to do it on your own rather than having to recruit a whole bunch of people, and if they actually "pay out".

They don't ask for a ton of personal information, which is a good start. Like MyPoints, you can accrue Swagbucks by shopping through their website. The interesting thing is that they seem to have a different list of websites to shop through, and it includes sites like Newegg.

Unlike MyPoints, they do not offer any sort of pay-per-click method of earning points. There are Polls, but they seem to be for amusement only, although you can earn points by submitting a poll question that they use. The main methods of earning points appear to be using their search engine (which will randomly award points), posting in their blog, shopping through their website, and referring friends. And while the gift card values may be lower, the number of points to buy them is also lower.

I run a ton of searches every day for various reasons, so that's no problem for me. They have a toolbar you can download, but I dislike and distrust most toolbars. I'm sure theirs is fine, but I won't be installing it after all of the trouble I've had removing crap like Yahoo! Toolbar from browsers in the past.

Doing the Math:
I seem to be averaging about 3 points per day (from searches) but I've only been a member for one day, after all. At this rate, it will take 13 more days to accrue the 45 points necessary for a $5.00 gift card.

It doesn't require a ton of effort - just regular everyday use running searches through their search engine (they have an algorithm to detect if you're running bogus searches and spamming searches, so doing that won't help you much).

Observations:
The blog is somewhat boring at the moment. The search engine isn't quite as good as Google, although they claim otherwise, and their Image search is annoying (it takes you to the webpage, not the image itself). On the other hand, it tends to spit up different results than Google, which can be useful in and of itself. I tend to run searches through different engines to see what each one picks up, so this isn't a problem for me.