Would you use Paid to search *opinions*

gnomer

Hope this is right board.

I'm thinking of launching a paid to search website.

Its where everytime you search the internet with us u'll be given a SearchPoint.

You can then convert your SearchPoints into cash into your paypal or use it to buy merchandise.

Would you use such a search engine if it paid out and had good search results?

I may be launching this soon.

CuLT

The only important factor really is the accuracy of the search results for me, personally.

I don't, however, see how you could avoid abuse of the service without restricting the abilities of your search engine, thus negating the reason for using it in the first place.

pwd

How would it be monetised?
Is it that sites pay to be listed? Or even that they pay to be listed early in the results?
That would mean the results would be incomplete and/or biased.
And since you couldn't reasonably pay someone very much for just running a search, it wouldn't be worth it.
So I would be distrustful of the service. You would eed to persuade me the search results would be good.
Even then I might still use google out of habit and familiarity tbh. It's practically ingrained At this stage I can type "google.com" faster than any other phrase.

gnomer

pwd wrote: »

How would it be monetised?

how are all other search engines monetised? advertising.

Itll use advertising to pay off everything,Good old CPC and CPM.

gnomer

CuLT wrote: »

I don't, however, see how you could avoid abuse of the service without restricting the abilities of your search engine, thus negating the reason for using it in the first place.

Yeah thats gona be hard but we will manage it.

pwd

Yes, but would advertising bias the results?
Like google have sponsored links at the top of the results, but they're clearly indicated as such.
I agree that exploitation of the payment system would be likely to be a problem.
I think a lot of people would be distrustful of it too, since it's new, and seems to be offering something for nothing.
It's an interesting idea, and you'd need something like this to try to take any market share really when competing with suc established services.

gnomer

pwd wrote: »

Yes, but would advertising bias the results?
Like google have sponsored links at the top of the results, but they're clearly indicated as such.
I agree that exploitation of the payment system would be likely to be a problem.
I think a lot of people would be distrustful of it too, since it's new, and seems to be offering something for nothing.
It's an interesting idea, and you'd need something like this to try to take any market share really when competing with suc established services.

Yep,Although I dont plan on it being as big as google.

ATM the plan we have about people using auto-search as we only have 10 paid searches a day,and verify accounts with an email,obviously when we get a good few active members this will change to a better system which pays different amounts for different searches etc.

aidan_walsh

I, for one, would not log in to search. Hell, I hate having to log in to read something, let alone search.

If I want to find something, I don't want to faff about trying to figure out how to.

zAbbo

aidan_walsh wrote: »

I, for one, would not log in to search. Hell, I hate having to log in to read something, let alone search.

If I want to find something, I don't want to faff about trying to figure out how to.

While I disagree with the OP's idea, I would prefer to login to search as the results are much more tailored, for example Google SERPS are vastly improved with knowing the previous search history.

gnomer

aidan_walsh wrote: »

I, for one, would not log in to search. Hell, I hate having to log in to read something, let alone search.

If I want to find something, I don't want to faff about trying to figure out how to.

You know your probably logged into your google account right now.

it would use cookies,And if you ever clear your cookies etc the site will warn you your not logged in.

aidan_walsh

gnomer wrote:

You know your probably logged into your google account right now.

You're right, I am. But I don't use Google's Web History service, so thats of little consequence.

gnomer

aidan_walsh wrote: »

You're right, I am. But I don't use Google's Web History service, so thats of little consequence.

I seem to be always logged into my Google account, I dont share my computer with anybody so I never bother to log out.

thats what people should do with my search engine,they leave it logged in with the cookie.

colly10

I voted bad idea, they only way that I would ever use it would be if the results were the same quality as google (even at that im used to google and know it's giving me good results). As for being paid to search what will stop people using something like QTP to rack their points up? If you put in them things to make sure it's a human user then it would be worse again cause those things are a pain in the stones.
You may also have difficulty getting people to pay to appear in the results untill your names really out there, I assume your planning on keeping the advertisements separate like google?
Also I assume that the money I would be make in a month would be so small that it would not be worth changing from google.

PogMoThoin

I voted no because i'm a tight-arse and don't believe in paying for anything i can get for free

gnomer

ok,
So lets pretend the search results are the same quality as Google.

And you dont do anything stupid that makes you look like a robot.

Would you use it? lets say you made 10euro in a month just from switching from Google and getting same results if not better,Would you be happy?

colly10

This all depends on whather your really asking a what if or if your really planning to implement something along these lines -

gnomer wrote: »

ok,
So lets pretend the search results are the same quality as Google.

That would be a fairly big ask in itself, IIRC google trawles the entire web approx 7 times regularly to work out the page rank of a page from a random starting point. You would probably need some serious hardware and some good way of calculating the quality of a page that matches googles standard.

gnomer wrote: »

And you dont do anything stupid that makes you look like a robot.

The first thing I would do if you created this system is to abuse the system to rack up money by using an automation tool, it would not be a difficult thing to do and you would need to work out a way to stop people expoliting the system. It would not make me "look like a robot", it would just do all the search work for me after I go to bed to rack up some money for me.

gnomer wrote: »

Would you use it? lets say you made 10euro in a month just from switching from Google and getting same results if not better,Would you be happy?

If you both matched google and I could not exploit it I still probably wouldn't use it cause whats a tenner a month tbh, im sure quite a few would use it though.
Do you honestly feel that you can match google and that people won't be able to exploit it though?

Peanut

I think your biggest problem would be in persuading people that it's not gimmicky. I imagine it's going to be mostly small payments that I could get from searching, so I probably just wouldn't bother, and use Google instead.

Also detecting click fraud will be tough and could take up far too many resources.

This idea has almost certainly been done before, and the fact that we are not all now getting paid to search suggests that there are real problems with it, but you might be able to make something of it if you find a suitable niche, and don't try to compete directly with the giants. I think you would need to seriously re-think it first, however.

jhegarty

Wasn't all this paid to surf/search thing tried and failed back around 97->99 ?

AARRRGH

This thread is reminding me of that zazommo (or whatever it's called) service.

Basically it's a search engine but companies have to pay to get listed in it.

Obviously a terrible idea, but somehow these guys have gotten loads of funding. So much so that they can advertise on TV.

Bizarre...

ianhobo

Personally - not really,

simply because I doubt that the returned search results would be any good (unless your returning google results behind the scenes through one of their search interface API's!)

A new search tool will not be able to achieve the abilities of google or similar without many many resources - mostly money!

Look at those who already have these resources at their disposal, do you use any of them as it is??? Unlikely...
1. Live search (MSN search)
2. Yahoo (Only after I've done a google search)
3. ask
4. on and on

Your only incentive to ensure that people return to use your search service again will be good search results

jhegarty

gnomer wrote: »

So lets pretend the search results are the same quality as Google.

Always a good first line in a buiness plan.... google are doing quite well without paying users , so if you have a search engine as good as google you don't need an angle....

jmcc

gnomer wrote: »

Hope this is right board.

I'm thinking of launching a paid to search website.

Its where everytime you search the internet with us u'll be given a SearchPoint.

You can then convert your SearchPoints into cash into your paypal or use it to buy merchandise.

Would you use such a search engine if it paid out and had good search results?

I may be launching this soon.

So you want to monetise the site with Google adsense and users will then click on these adverts and get a share of the revenue?

As for building a search engine - do you even have any idea of what that involves?

Anyway opinion based search is already being done: www.mahalo.com and even Search Wikia is trying (and failing drastically) to get a social search thing going.

Regards...jmcc

colly10

jmcc wrote: »

So you want to monetise the site with Google adsense and users will then click on these adverts and get a share of the revenue?

As for building a search engine - do you even have any idea of what that involves?

Anyway opinion based search is already being done: www.mahalo.com and even Search Wikia is trying (and failing drastically) to get a social search thing going.

Regards...jmcc

I think you get paid to use the search rather than click the links, its been done before, they do still exist, I bet most would struggle to name one of them though let alone use it

jmcc

colly10 wrote: »

I think you get paid to use the search rather than click the links, its been done before, they do still exist, I bet most would struggle to name one of them though let alone use it

Any decent search engine needs a critical mass of users before it becomes successful. The funny thing with search engines is that everyone thinks that it easy to build one until they try. Some of the better ones end up with an infrastructure that is capable of indexing a part of the web but they are playing catch-up against Google/Yahoo/Microsoft (GYM). Some even build good algorithms that provide reasonable results. However what really kills these search engines, apart from the monetisation angle, is the site acquisition. GYM have the resources to apply what is in effect a brute force attack on the web looking for websites. They detect new sites by following links. That approach only works when you have an economy of scale. And it is, in my opinion, extremely inefficient.

There are differing views as to the size of the web. There are about 96.76M com/net/org/biz/info domains registered at the moment. But not all of those domains are active or contain usable content. At an estimate, about 10% of them are usable content. I've just spent the last few weeks working in the latest .eu survey and 1.72M .eu websites were checked for content, whehter the content was unique, duplicated, PPC pages, holding pages etc. Only 13.46% of all those sites checked were unique. This will probably fall a bit more as I apply some more sorting/parsing algorithms. However this rapid deployment index could create a .eu search engine within weeks as opposed to GYM's approach which tends to work in terms of years. The problem for any new search engine is that not only is it up against GYM, it is also up against other potential search engine operations that it may not even be aware of. The search engine business, on a global basis is a very tough one and the players tend to be ruthless and efficient. If they are not then they don't last very long. The average lifetime of a search engine is about 18 months. Most of them fail because the people running them do not understand what they are doing and how to make monetise it.

Regards...jmcc

ianhobo

jmcc wrote: »

They detect new sites by following links. That approach only works when you have an economy of scale. And it is, in my opinion, extremely inefficient

But the benefit of that approach is in the ranking side of things as opposed to the content, and is a major technique in automatically determining the "value" that is placed on a website and its content.

Regardless of how "bad" the design on a website can be, either visually or programatically, once it has numerous backlinks to it (showing that these other site place a value in the content of the website) it will be indexed and will rank well

If a search engine isn't going to go out and crawl the web by itself by following these links, then it must use another method. Unfortunately this usually means user submission of sites. Something very much open to abuse and something which can easily divert resources

gnomer

PogMoThoin wrote: »

I voted no because i'm a tight-arse and don't believe in paying for anything i can get for free

Your not paying i'm paying you.

gnomer

jmcc wrote: »

So you want to monetise the site with Google adsense and users will then click on these adverts and get a share of the revenue?

As for building a search engine - do you even have any idea of what that involves?

Anyway opinion based search is already being done: www.mahalo.com and even Search Wikia is trying (and failing drastically) to get a social search thing going.

Regards...jmcc

This isnt my first website I have the bot nearly finished and I am using mihalism search index + my own for now(its free).

I might even buy that business access that google have which sites such as http://dogpile.com have so I could use there index.

But even if I had there index my algorithims wouldnt be as good,although I like what ive done so far,I have gotten the mihalism search script and Im playing with the orders and I like it.

Dont expect to see this site up for atleast another two months still.

And maybe I might be using Adsense but the be full idea is to make most my money off a publisher/advertiser network,(like adsense and adwords by Google)which is a future project.

gnomer

jmcc wrote: »

The funny thing with search engines is that everyone thinks that it easy to build one until they try.

Im building mine off Mihalism search and using there site index at the start.

I have a working non-paying search engine and I like the results,One of my new PR0 sites is in the Mihalism index! all of my PR3 sites are in it too! infact all but one of my sites are in the Mihalism index.

tomED

I'm sure I'd use a search engine every now and again if I was paid to do so. Results would have to be as good as google and have all the extra search abilities that google gives.

It will be hard to take people away from Google, but I guess Google had to do it too, so...

Bob the Builder

tomED wrote: »

It will be hard to take people away from Google, but I guess Google had to do it too, so...

Well Google weren't competing with a large international company back then. All they had to do was edge ahead of the sketchy results of MSN and yahoo! and voila, they were in the lead. It's much harder now...

OP, I can't see it working, but you have my support.

tomED

nevf wrote: »

Well Google weren't competing with a large international company back then. All they had to do was edge ahead of the sketchy results of MSN and yahoo! and voila, they were in the lead. It's much harder now...

Yahoo was a large international company back then... You also had altavista which was large in relative terms.

It wasnt to do with company size that made Google end up the leading search engine, it was purely the quality of their search results. So there's no reason why it couldn't happen again.

colly10

tomED wrote: »

Yahoo was a large international company back then... You also had altavista which was large in relative terms.

It wasnt to do with company size that made Google end up the leading search engine, it was purely the quality of their search results. So there's no reason why it couldn't happen again.

It could be but it would probably be very difficult, you would have to think up something better than the pagerank algorithm, also it was a bit easier for google in some things eg - yahoo also used to bring back the plural of a word when ye searched, when google got rid of that that was another advantage

Bob the Builder

tomED wrote: »

Yahoo was a large international company back then... You also had altavista which was large in relative terms.

It wasnt to do with company size that made Google end up the leading search engine, it was purely the quality of their search results. So there's no reason why it couldn't happen again.

Well you're going to have to pull a much more smarter rabbit out of the hat if you're too succeed. PageRank has already been invented, but if you have another idea of the same magnitude, your site will prosper, otherwise, think doom. People won't even want to get paid if they're getting crappy results.

Leginos

The fundamental idea isn't a bad one. Sharing the profits with customers to generate more profit. However, there are alot of things you'd have to watch out for apart from the obvious difficulty with software/hardware. Monetisation would have to be seriously thought out. In order for the whole "we're a search engine who pays you" idea to work, you have to pay out enough money to make it worth while to your users. Assuming you display CPC google ads initially to fund your site, you'd first have to work out how many searches a user will make before clicking an ad (let's assume 10 - highly optimistic). that means that to break even you would have to pay each user 1/10 of the value you are receiving for each ad click, every time they perform a search. Now let's assume that you on average receive 10c per click. That works out to be 1c per search (10c / 10 searches). So in this scenario your users would recive 1cent for every search they did. Google's terms and conditions specify that you can't go the route of paying users to click on ads, but paying them to use your site would not appear to be in breach of this.

Now in the above example, a user receives 1c per click, which means that they would have to do 1000 searches to get €10. I don't think the rewards would be sufficient to encourage users to use your site. Furthermore the above figures are HIGHLY optimistic. It is more likely that users will click an ad 1% of the time (as opposed to 10% above). So the reality is that for every 1,000 searches they get €1. It would take me 3 months to make €1:eek: And this is giving them 100% of the ad revenue. This doesn't take account of costs of running the site (hosting, etc. etc.).

The only way I could see this working is with large amounts of investment for advertising, hosting etc. Secondly you would have to pay far more out than you would be receiving in. In order for companies to advertise directly on your site, you would have to be offering them a far cheaper deal than they would get with Google, Yahoo, etc., reducing your income further.

Perhaps a wealthy entrepeneur might be prepared to suffer huge financial losses while the site builds up its traffic, paying far more out per search than coming in from ads. if you do offer more money, then alot of your users will perform searches simply to get the cash, and not out of genuine browsing - meaning they will be even less likely to click on your ads.

And these difficulties are on top of all the various difficulties already described in previous posts, such as user trust, biased results etc.

You could alternatively only pay out when they follow one of the search results (not ads - Google policy afaik). But to make money on this you would have to develop your own ad software, and client base. But this in turn has similar problems and will lead inevitably to biased results, lack of user confidence, and many, many other problems.

Your only hope would be to suffer huge debt in the hopes of building up huge traffic, (the more traffic, the more debt) and then hope that Google or Microsoft come calling to buy you out, youTube style... but that's a very big gamble.

If you haven't bothered reading all of this epic novel:rolleyes:, then just make damn sure that your financial figures are correct before spending too much more time or money. If you have other ways of monetising it also, and the figures look good, then it may be worth a shot. Personally, I can't see myself using it, as the rewards are likely to be insufficient, and I'd be very skeptical about the results.

fintan

gnomer wrote: »

Yeah thats gona be hard but we will manage it.

You have no hope of accruately preventing people from scamming the system.

Leginos

Had a look at your site. looks pretty good. How are things going?