The principle is pretty simple, you need to register, execute a search and every day Oparla picks a winner. One thousand pounds is the prize! Good idea, but who is going to use this search engine over and over only for the chance of winning a prize?

So let see what this ‘new’ search engine can do. First, Oparla looks pretty much like Google before the search, simple with a clear call to action (only one button ‘search’)

Oparla

The Oparla result page on the default view is very different from the classic Google/Yahoo appearance. It is a list of the results with three columns, title, summary and URL. To be honest this list of websites doesn’t look very pretty, but at least the search result page is pretty quick to load.  At anytime you can switch to the classic view.

Oparla

The results of the search are pretty good for a ‘small’ search engine although occasionally the search engine doesn’t  find the most relevant result (e.g.: selected the LinkedIn directory page instead of my actual profile page when I entered my name).

In conclusion, this search engine who (can) give you money is a pretty good marketing idea but after few days I am not sure that it will be enough to keep people using Oparla. Also, I didn’t see any major benefit compared to Yahoo or Google. To be honest with you, I really don’t believe that this search engine will do well… Anyway the official launch is the 14th of April.

Good luck Oparla