Epicurean Style

Groupon

Okay guys.  So my absence on here has been long enough, right?  Anyway, I was telling you all about a great website I found the other day that I have been LOVing!  It's about time I pass the fun along.  Okay, so it is called Groupon.  You guys. seriously.  this site is awesome.  They get awesome deals for places in your city.  Not just dumpy places or places that you don't want to go to, but really awesome things.  Things that make living in your city waaaay more fun.  So lets say you go to the website and they Don't have YOUR city, then go here, because I am absolutely positive that you are going to want to have them come to your city next.   

Enjoy. 

Blingo

I was recently introduced to the powerful search engine Blingo.  Have you ever heard of it?  Well, it is a search engine like yahoo or google or anything, but there's a little twist.  Each time you use their search engine you have the chance to win a prize. 

Blingo was created by Publishers Clearing House and simply gives away prizes to searchers that use the engine at random.  Blingo uses Live Search, Ask.com, Yahoo! and Google for its search results. Except for the possibility of winning a prize, searching images with Blingo is essentially the same as searching through Picsearch (an image search engine) itself. However, since the unveiling of Google "Universal Search", Blingo search results have become limited when compared with Google search results. In addition to the web results returned by Blingo, Google integrates images, maps, book citations, video, and news. 

There is a networking aspect built into the service. If a user recruits a friend, and the friend wins, the user will receive the same prize.

Though according to a December 2004 article in PC Magazine Blingo search results were once supplied by Gigablast, currently Blingo draws upon Google for its results. Blingo's image searching service is powered by Picsearch, which is a filtered image search engine. Picsearch's search results are generally more thoroughly screened than those offered by Google Image Search, and as such, Blingo's image search is generally more workplace and family friendly than Google image results.

Blingo does not require any personal information to use the service; however users who do register also will receive a daily entry into the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes with their first search of the day. If a user does win a prize, standard address information will be required to ship the prize. Because of its nature as a middleman between users and the search engines which it draws results from, the privacy of Blingo users is determined not just by Blingo's privacy policy, but by the policies of the search engines which it queries. Whether Blingo tracks user searches and user activity on a "per-account" basis has not been made clear. Also, while the Blingo privacy policy states how they do use your email address, it does not explain what they do not do. For example, it does not state that they do not sell your email address.