iRazoo - Social Searching with Rewards and Prizes

Are you unsatisfied with the results that a Google search turns up? Are too many of the links irrelevant or not at all useful? Well, if so, there is a new social search engine aiming to provide you with a new way to search. Sure there are Mahalo and Aftervote, but now there is iRazoo, which goes one step further… with prizes.

This new social search engine, developed by four Houston entrepreneurs and launched today, is claiming to be the ?world?s first people-powered, points driven, search engine.? Imagine getting a digital camera or an iPod just for searching.

The power of the people comes into play when you view a site that you find with the search engine. You are asked in a small frame at the top of the window if you recommend the site. Your answer is then combined with the results of other users which determines the future ranking of that site. It is fairly simple and similar to AfterVote.

What sets it apart, however, is that its users are given the opportunity to register and earn points when they use the iRazoo social search engine. Those points that are earned, can then be exchanged for prizes and merchandise. The service claims that “by incentivizing users, the search engine creates loyalty among users who return to both benefit from the search engine?s user recommended results and to gain points which they can redeem for merchandise.”

How do you earn points? It's easy… you get points for each search you perform (2 points per search for up to 50 points per day), for each website you recommend (2 per site for up to 50 points per day), and also for each referral you make (10 points per referral, unlimited points per day).

iRazoo allows its searching members to determine what the top results will be, unlike Mahalo, which has a dedicated community of guides (I happen to be one of them) who create search results for each term. Both services, however, allow users to request links to be added to the service for a given search term. Whether or not it appears on iRazoo is all up to the community who must give it positive recommendations in order for a site to move up the ranks.

This new service has a great plan with the points system to keep users coming back. If it is actually able to provide valuable prizes and merchandise to its users who make iRazoo their primary search destination, it could become a very popular search engine.

Will this be enough to take it past the top search engines though? With Google, Yahoo!, and MSN commanding more than 95% of the web search queries, iRazoo has some big competition to beat.

This is one search engine that I would at least recommend trying, because you could potentially be rewarded just for using it. Be prepared to be patient though, as an iPod shuffle amounts to 58,000 points! There is a browser plugin download available, however, which should make it less time-consuming to perform searches.

If you try iRazoo, be sure to let me know what you think of this new search service.