Thursday, March 15, 2007 at 11:11:31 AM
Stoney sent me an email this morning that inquired about the way that GoodSearch makes its money. GoodSearch is another donate-for-free search engine that is similar to Search Kindly, but in my opinion, not as good (pun intended;).
First of all, GoodSearch is not a non-profit organization. Now that's not to say that they are bad people (hey, outside of working on Search Kindly, I'm a pretty hardcore capitalist), it's just that I don't feel that I should reap huge rewards from the collective volunteering of thousands of people. In the case of GoodSearch, they take half of the money that is made from each search at their site. In other words, half of the money that their volunteers help to raise gets taken as GoodSearch's cut. And then they take all of the money in instances that a volunteer doesn't designate their preferred charity. Personally, I think that's just plain wrong.
Like I said before, I don't mind making money, and I fully embrace the capitalist-entrepreneurial spirit. But there's a time and place for everything. This, however, is not the only reason why I don't particularly care for GoodSearch. The other reason is Google-search.
I have a small beef with Google because our AdSense account was disabled and they wouldn't even give us a reason as to why or send us a communication from an actual human being. But that beef that I have...it has nothing at all to do with the quality of Google's search results. I spend A LOT of time in front of a computer, and I've dug around a good bit looking into other search engines. Google, as far as I'm concerned, really is the best, which is why it is the search engine that powers Search Kindly.
GoodSearch, however, uses Yahoo. Now Yahoo isn't bad or anything--it's just not good. And judging from the results of the survey that I administered a little while back, a lot of people seem to agree with me. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm going to ask thousands of people to volunteer on a daily basis, then I really need to make the process as painless as possible. And being that a large portion of our volunteers are in school and depend on their search engine for all of their researching and educational needs, there's no reason not to provide the very best search experience.
And just as an added note, I'm hoping to contact someone at Google's charity-works division in a few months in order for us to get our old account back. I figure if we can prove how much we are doing and how many people there are supporting this cause, then we should be able to convince an actual human being over at Google to allow us to raise as much money per search as GoodSearch is making (GoodSearch states that they are making roughly 1-cent per search; I think they might be exagerating just a bit, but what do I know). I'll start that process of begging and groveling to make amends with Google once we are able to raise $2000 in a month.
Wouldn't it be cool to be a part of an organization that donates tens of thousand of dollars on a monthly basis? Well, that's the goal here...and I'm really glad that you all are trying to help us meet it.
