If you are trying to get your money back after receiving no leads from advertising on ePerks, chances are you are out of luck. As one real estate agent learned, ePerks is to file for bankruptcy and is offering a 20% refund. If you are not happy with a 20% refund tough luck- you may get nothing after the bankruptcy goes through:

Yesterday, Michael with ePerks called me on my cell phone & said that eperks will be filing for bankruptcy & will not be refunding my money. I was floored. This is really upsetting to me. I cannot believe that a company that is STILL selling memberships would tell me that they will not keep their word. He said that I have 2 options- that I can walk away now with 20% of what they owe me “so that I get something” or I can agree to be pd out over the next yr, but if they file for bankruptcy then they owe me NOTHING. - read the entire article here.

The agent goes on blaming, of all things, government for not covering ePerks under the blanket of recent bailouts:

(Michael) told me that times are really tough for the company with the economy being like it is and unfortunately eperks didn’t get to be part of the government bail-out & doesn’t have the money to pay back all of the people that want their money back.

Well since we are using the recent events in the economy, why don’t we bring up Bernard Madoff as well. Why? Thea answer is LeapLish.com- a new search engine launched by the same group of people. if Unlike for Michael (the sales rep cited above)- things for LeapFish sales representatives look peachy. According to a recruitment ad on Craigslist, a sales rep can make $150,000 a year while working at LeapFish. I am not surprised at all that ePerks decided to fold down their shop, just about after about one month of unsuccessfully trying to get traction with the search engine and even having been humiliated on the world’s leading technology blog TechChrunch.

It has to be said that LeapFish.com and DotNexInc did their best to distance themselves from Brabus Ventures and ePerks. It appears that founders and sales people at LeapFish are infatuated with real estate agents- just take a look how much astroturfing has been done on ActiveRain.

I don’t know how the bankruptcy works. Never filed for one. Never plan to. If it works the way I think it works, it’s a great way to screw your clients. The hell with the clients, just file for bankruptcy start another business. Why shouldn’t life be peachy?

I have decided to play around with Google Custom Search. Now you can find pages and documents on this domain using the big “G”. Since this website is powered by WordPress, many who read this post will wonder why? Do I trust Google more? The answer to this question is yeas and no. Mos of the WordPress themes today include a “search box”. This default search in WordPress will serve your visitors the most up to date results, since there maybe some latest posts on our website that Google has not yet discovered. So why on earth would some one consider using Google?

There few reasons to consider.

It may help you to avoid duplicate content. Unfortunately some of the WordPress themes are written poorly. Some times it can happen that what suppose to a “search” results can be indexed in the search engines. In fact, there is no way for a search engine to tell a regular page apart from a page produced by your on site “search function”. I am not sure if this is a common problem but it does happen.

If you have several similar websites, you can tell Google Custom Search to serve results from the all of your websites. You can even include websites that do not belong to you, but you think that your visitors would benefit from the results.

You can refine the results so your visitors after performing a search will be served with the most relevant search results.

I also think that the “native” search option of WordPress is underutilized. When you place the Google Custom Search code on your website, the text box has Google’s logo in it. Don’t forget that word google had become a verb, it is associated with search. Don’t tell me you have never said: “Let me Google this or that out”!

Many of the visitors to your website will recognize Google’s loge before recognizing anything else on your website.

I personally have chosen to serve the search results via an AJAX Search API interface, I just thought it looked really sharp. So go ahead try my new search box and let me know what do you think.