Would you use Paid to search *opinions*

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?