Paid per search? Doesn’t sound quite right

My Search Funds is offer­ing to pay you just for web searches. That’s prob­a­bly one of the eas­i­est ways to earn money, since after all, you do use Google or Yahoo right? Results are obtained from Yahoo, Ask, and Win­dows Live. Google is not sup­ported since Google doesn’t per­mit third par­ties to mod­ify searches. In order words, MySearch­Funds would be Dog­pile, except that it pays.

The new Dogpile?

Dog­pile is already pop­u­lar enough just for imple­ment­ing the idea of com­bin­ing all your favorite (and not-so-favorite) search engines in one. My Search Funds is very sim­i­lar, except that you need to install a plu­gin in order to use their ser­vice. This plu­gin appears to record your searches, nat­u­rally since it has to know how and what you are search­ing for. The pro­gramme may dis­credit related searches so as to pre­vent “repeated searches”.

It’s pretty unusual that some­one would offer paid to search ser­vices, espe­cially since they may make a huge loss out of it. I’m sure that My Search Funds would be using the infor­ma­tion col­lected in order to per­fect their search results, or some­thing else. Nonethe­less, for those of you who are not too con­cerned with pri­vacy issues, go ahead and use My Search Funds.

Nonethe­less, the infor­ma­tion col­lected by My Search Funds would be incred­i­bly use­ful to com­pa­nies like Alexa, since it records search traffic.

Pri­vacy issue?

My Search Funds states in its pri­vacy pol­icy and Terms of ser­vices that it would col­lect infor­ma­tion and retain it. For­tu­nately, it’s not much of a prob­lem, since Google does almost the same. How­ever, the fact that they are will­ing to divulge your per­sonal infor­ma­tion to the author­i­ties meant that they will keep your per­sonal infor­ma­tion for­ever. Most search com­pa­nies do not do that, so you may want to be wary of that.

Not much infor­ma­tion was given on how the infor­ma­tion might be used for future purposes.

To trust or not to?

There are no costs involved in par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pro­gramme, but you may want to note that My Search Funds is record­ing what­ever you are search­ing. While you may not mind that, some do espe­cially if they are search­ing for you-know-what. The pay rate sounds cheesy — but it’s pos­si­ble that they may have got­ten that from just ad revenue.

Tagged as: MySearchFunds, Search