Anyone can search – and anyone can get paid for it!

Note: this post may contain affiliate links.  And honestly, it probably does. View my affiliate link disclaimer here.

Consult most of the make-money blogs, and they’ll, pretty much unanimously, tell you that you should use Swagbucks for all your internet searches.  They’ll tell you that you’ll make the most money doing so.

But should you search with Swagbucks?

For that matter, should you search with only one site?

In order:  yes and no.  You can get rewarded from several different search portals (and none of them is Google).  You may as well get as many rewards as you can while you search, right?

You can get rewarded from several different search portals (and none of them is Google).

I’ve tried several search portals.  Some of them, to be fair, are not so great…but quite a few are definitely worth your time, especially if you are getting nothing with your current search engine.

We’ll start with everyone’s favorite:

Swagbucks:

Swagbucks has been around for almost a decade, and it shows no signs of losing steam.  In addition to earning through searching, you can earn Swagbucks (worth pretty much one penny apiece) through activities such as taking surveys, completing offers, answering a daily poll, watching videos, and shopping.

Now, you will not earn for every search you do on Swagbucks.  The way to earn through searching on this site is to receive a message saying that you have won after performing a search.  (Important:  you have to claim the win in a reasonable amount of time, before it expires.)  You can win, at most, four times a day; the amount of SB per win varies but is usually about ten at a time.

Potential daily search earnings:  $0.30-$1.00*

But there are many others, including one from a very, very large company:

Microsoft Rewards:

Don’t like Google?  Well, how about Bing?  If you sign up and search with Bing, you can earn 5 points per search, up to 150 points a day.  (Another 100 points is available for searching Bing with your mobile device.)  You can also earn just for using Microsoft Edge, for taking quizzes, or for shopping at the Windows, Xbox, and Microsoft stores.

And how much is one point?  A lot of the prizes for which you can redeem your points (at least, those that aren’t for Microsoft products) have an exchange rate of about 5250 points for a $5 gift card, making each point worth about a tenth of a cent.

Potential daily search earnings:  $0.24*

InboxDollars:

As with Swagbucks, InboxDollars offers rewards for all sorts of things:  reading emails, completing offers and surveys, watching videos, and playing games.  This site rewards frequent searches, with a few cents offered to those who search for four distinct terms in one day and five (formerly ten) cents given to those who search on the site four days out of the week.

Potential daily search earnings: $0.04* (not counting weekly bonus)

Bonus:  Get $5 free, just for joining InboxDollars!

TreasureTrooper:

Like Swagbucks and InboxDollars, TreasureTrooper gives rewards for all sorts of activities – in fact, pretty much the same ones at the other two.  The additional income opportunity with TreasureTrooper, however, is through the training and fighting of virtual dragons.  Users can sell one adult dragon per month for a minimum of $5.

Searching income, though, is harder to come by through this program.  As with Swagbucks, wins are random; with this program, when the wins come, they are in the form of arrowheads, which are worth one penny.  You can win one to ten arrowheads at one time, but, in my experience, you won’t win more than ten in any one day.

Potential daily search earnings:  $0.10*

Irazoo:

Irazoo is pretty much like most of the other programs in this post. The one issue I have with them at the moment is that, though they release promo codes for extra points each day, you must complete an offer to take advantage of it.  Hey, that’s their prerogative, but it’s my prerogative to spend most of my time at other search rewards sites.

Now, as with Swagbucks, you can win points at random times when you search, and you don’t have to have done any offers to get credited.  The usual amount of points you can win is about 15.  3600 points gets you $5 via PayPal. I’ve never won points more than once on this site.

Potential daily search earnings: $0.02*

Bonus:  Get 500 points free when you use invite code XU39TX!

Gifthulk:

Yet another offer/survey/whatever/search program, GIfthulk will give you four Hulk coins (HC) for each search, once per hour.  10,000 HC gets you $10, so you can make $0.004 every hour you search.

Potential daily search earnings:  $0.09*

Those are the six different search engines I use these days.  There have been others in the past, but they have mostly gone by the wayside.

My general method of handling searches is to use TreasureTrooper for ten searches, spaced at least five minutes apart, in order to get a dragon scale (more on that in a later post).  If I need to search for something else within the five-minute waiting period, I generally use Bing (for Microsoft Rewards). I try to also get in four searches at InboxDollars, which gets me the daily bonus there. Honestly, I don’t search as much with the random-win sites because I simply don’t have that sort of patience.

Oh, and one more thing: make them legitimate searches. You have enough things you wonder about each day not to have to make up things to search for. Just searching at random for things you never intend to click will eventually kill the search reward industry.

But assuming you are searching for all legitimate items that actually interest you, you can make a little money doing it.  It isn’t much, to be sure, but how much are you getting paid to use Google all the time?

* This amount does not include potential earnings from other offers, surveys, or things like that.