Challenger Search Engine vs. Google and Bing: A Program That Earns User Loyalty

You are a product manager at a search engine that competes with Google and Bing, and you are asked to create a loyalty program for it. Explain what the program should achieve, who it is for, how it works, and how you would know whether it is succeeding. ```hint Price a loyal user Before choosing perks, work out what keeps people on an incumbent search engine and roughly what a retained user is worth to yours, so the program's rewards have both a purpose and a ceiling. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Is this a new, small engine trying to win its first users, or an established one with a meaningful user base that it wants to keep? - Is the program's main job to attract users, to keep them from drifting back to an incumbent, or to increase how often they search? - Does the engine make its money from search ads like the incumbents, or from another model? - Is the program for people who search, or should it also cover advertisers? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A clear goal for the program and how it ties to the way the engine earns money - Candidate user segments compared, with one chosen based on who would realistically change a search habit - Program mechanics (what earns rewards, what users can redeem, any status or non-cash perks) and why each one rewards the intended behavior - The abuse, cost and advertiser-trust risks that come from rewarding search activity, and how the design handles them - Metrics that separate real, incremental loyalty from reward-chasing, with cost and quality guardrails ### Follow-up Questions - If an incumbent copied your program within months, what part of it would still give you an edge? - How would you tell users who are loyal to the engine apart from users who are loyal only to the rewards? - How would advertisers view traffic from rewarded users, and what would you do to keep their trust?