Bing Rewards: Microsoft will pay you to use its search engine

Everyone knows Google is the king of the search websites on the web. Every day, you might use it for dozens of searches, but what do you get out of it? Nothing but what Google chooses to show you. However, the science of search engine algorithms is pretty well straightforward, and they're earning millions of dollars from your eyeballs looking at what they want you to see. Personally, I love Google, but the gap between the quality of their results and their primary competitors has narrowed in recent years as those competitors have stepped it up.

Microsoft has chosen to fight back against Google's dominant market share by cutting you off a small piece of the pie. Their Bing Rewards search engine works well enough that I've replaced my built in browser search engine with. You can earn up to 15 points a day, with 2 searches per point. They offer a daily bonus point on your account dashboard that's worth snagging.

They offer different rewards levels, with basic, silver, and gold. Getting to gold involves doing a certain amount of searches, and maintaining 150 searches per month, which is a piece of cake if you follow my tip of using it as your browser's primary search engine. Once you reach gold, you get a discount on prizes. They offer contests, XBox Live points, and Amazon (or other) Gift Cards to cash out with as the most attractive offers.

Part of attaining gold is to cash out at least once. I highly suggest using one of their 5-10 point contest entries for this if you want to knock this requirement out of the way quickly. Gift cards take about 500 points, or around 475 with the gold discount.

You can earn an easy 50 bonus points by linking your Microsoft account with your Facebook, if that's something you're comfortable with. You can earn 10 points per referral to the program, up to 100 points total.

As a side note: It's worth pointing out Bing's image search engine hasn't been nerfed like Google's has. They treat you like an actual adult, not feeling the need to censor you if safe search is off.