This has been tried before hasn’t it? Services that pay you to surf, click, search, or share have been around since the dawn of the internet and one has to wonder from two perspectives; first, why don’t they catch on as significantly as you might expect and second, what’s the catch?
I like Scour and perhaps therein lies the path to success. The features need to be rich, the experience fulfilling, and the process intuitive and seamless. Scour, a search technology that pays you to search, comment, and vote on results, delivers.
Why does it work? As a search result set, the experience is cleaner and more effective delivering user feedback, votes, and rankings from Google, Yahoo and MSN. The engine is, after all, only pulling results from the big 3 so if you search on them anyway, why not use Scour and get the engines blended with insight to how and where the results appear. The result set is even customizable allowing you to favor one engine over the other while limiting the number of results from each engine.
Intuitive? You can install a toolbar or plugin with desktop widgets coming soon such that you can search as easily from anywhere as you do now. No need to visit a specific site or build a pyramid scheme to drive the monetization which is as straightforward as it can be, just use it and get paid.
Now I wouldn’t recommend this as a referral alone; it is an exercise in testing the experience and soliciting your feedback so if you have used or use Scour, please let me know what you think. I’ve started using it and think of it like Airline Miles: I might as well get paid for something I’m doing anyway.
And yes, those are referral links