People who join the community-oriented search engine PreFound.com can apply to be Featured Finders and get all the Google AdSense revenue derived from their PreFound pages.
Steve Mansfield’s PreFound search engine aims at improving search results by having users “pre-find” them for searchers who follow. To help overcome the “chicken and egg” issue a site has when it depends on user contributions to content, PreFound now offers to pay its Featured Finder users to search and bolster its index.
The company described in a statement how Google fits in to the Featured Finder picture, and why PreFound will try out paying for content, albeit indirectly:
The advertising revenue will come in the form of Google AdSense and will be paid directly to each Featured Finder from Google. The amount of revenue derived will depend on traffic to each Featured Finder’s page and prevailing fee amounts paid by Google AdSense.
“Paying people to search and share what they’ve found is a concept that’s gaining in popularity. Community and social search is the wave of the future, but these types of sites need to quickly build high-quality, human-indexed content, and their members are looking for the motivation to participate in this effort,” said Mansfield. “Further, advertisers are anxious to take advantage of targeting large groups of users that are all interested in common products and services, which PreFound.com provides.”
PreFound also has some improvements planned for launch this week. Users will be able to import bookmark lists from Del.icio.us, with support for importing Yahoo! My Web 2.0 and Furl coming later.
Offering inducements to searchers became a topic of interest last year, when Bill Gates told a British publication that search engines might have to start paying their users. His MSN Search division just launched a promotion where it will reward searchers with prizes over a three-month period.
Yahoo has launched a trial balloon, contacting Yahoo Mail users about the types of incentives they might want in exchange for using a Yahoo search rewards toolbar. Among those incentives: frequent flier miles, Netflix discounts, and Yahoo Mail service upgrades.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
