Welcome to part 1 of my tutorial series on how to find new contests/sweepstakes to enter.  This article is going to focus on using the power of the search engine, specifically google and bing in order to find new contests to enter and to share on sites such as the /r/giveaways and /r/sweepstakes subreddits.
Now I know what you are thinking,
“Geeze, thanks for wasting my time, I already know how to use google, thanks.”
And I am sure you do know how, but do you know what to search and what exact settings to set in order to most effectively find new contests? Â There is basically two simple steps, that one you know, will make everything click into place. Â The first is limiting your search results to just the past 24 hours. Â When you first start searching, I suggest you do a week, so you can go through posts that may have been missed.
How to Limit Search Results to Last 24 Hours in Google
First thing you are going to do is do a search, for our test we will search for the word “test”. Â Then once there we will find where it says search tools and click on it:
After you click Search Tools, the bar there will now look something like this:
Click where it says Any Time, this will create a popup that lets you set timeframes to search for, select 24 hours as shown:
Now all your results are limited to posts indexed by google from the last 24 hours, while we have this google page open, each time we search from here, it will keep the 24 hour limit in place.
Now before we move onto what we are going to search, I will show you how to do the same thing in Bing. Â The difference with Bing and Google is each time you do a new search with Bing, you will have to reset the post limit, google remembers it.
How to Limit Search Results to Last 24 Hours in Google
In this demo we are going to search for the word “test” at bing.com.
When you are at bing.com search results, next to the total number of records found in your search, you will see a dropdown where it says “Any Time”, clicking on this will limit the records you see to a specific range of time as shown:
Click on the 24 hours, and your current search results will now be limited to those that bing.com has indexed in the last 24 hours.
Search Guide
Now for the part you have been waiting for, what to search! Â First I’m going to go over the logic of what to search, how to find it, and then I am going to provide a list of examples (not going to give you them all, I mean I need some secrets).
Basically what we are going to look at is finding some text that is unique to that contest platform and that appears on every page.
Most often the text I search for is the verbiage about what is powering the giveaway, be it promosimple, contestfriend, contest domination, king sumo or others. Â For woobox, gleam, rafflecopter and others, I find twitter is much more reliable, and how to use twitter to find contests will be in a future installment of this series of “How to Find Contests”
Below you will find a list of examples of what I search to find new contests, feel free to add more in comments for other people to use:
- “Powered by KingSumo”
- “Powered by Contest Domination”
- “Powered by ContestFriend”
- “Powered by PromoSimple”
Please note that the Quotes are very important to having the proper results returned, and don’t forget to make sure it is just searching a recent time frame and not “Any Time”
This is just a short list to get you started, take a look at other contest types you frequently enter, and see if there is some text that appears on every contests page.
Known Issue
Please note that this method is not perfect, sometimes the results will return what appear to be brand new contests, but they actually ended 6-9 months ago, this is because something in the page changed (updated version of script or something else) so it has updated the indexed information.
Also with many searches on google you may see something like this on the bottom:
If you click on where it says “repeat the search with the omitted results included” you may find that it has some different contests that were not listed originally before.
Part 2 Coming Soon!