Rob's Blog

Back in February I wrote that the promising service Homepages Friends (formally MySearchFunds) had stopped paying out, (wel, they seemed to have stopped paying me anyway).

Any members will have seen the emails they sent recently. The first one seemed to give you the option of paying your earnings to a charity instead and the second one gave tyhe option of using the earnings to offset your carbon emissions. Neither was very clear about what exactly was happening.

Today I received an email clarifying it. They are going to stop paying users for their searches (as of 1 August), and instead will be donating it to your chosen “cause”.

They do say that any searches made before then will be paid (regardless of whether the threshold is reached), but I’m not sure whether to trust that, given how long I’ve waited for my payout (they owe over £50 now).

They are still due to pay for referrals, but only a flat ratre so it could take a long time to make anything!

I decided to look for an alternative, and came across Scour. They don’t pay as much per search, but you can increase your earnings by reviewing or voting for results. It also aggregates Google, MSN (or Bing) and Yahoo results, and it all looks much slicker than HomepagesFriends (in fact it looks like a nice search engine even without the payment!). Worth a try. Of course it would be great if you used my referral link.

I’d love to hear your comments.

My Search Funds announced today in an email to their users (or at least me) that they are to become Homepages Friends. It seems they are moving away from just paid searches, to add more cashback services (like their existing eBay cashback).

One downside is that they are moving away from Google to use Yahoo as their search provider. It looks like they are hoping to add more Yahoo services to Homepages Friends in the future. Maybe we will see a service that pays you to check your mail?

The Homepages Friends domain (homepagesfriends.com according to the logo in the email) isn’t active yet, although similar domains redirect to www.whitedotbox.com which seems to be the same organisation and offers search income to sports clubs etc.

They promise changes over the next few days, in the meantime we can get paid to use Google.

I hope this continues to be a good service – I have over £30 accumulated so far!

[Update 2008-06-09:] The changeover has taken place – see my new post.

I wanted to be able to use the fantastic My Search Funds from my Google Homepage (iGoogle), so I decided to try my hands at creating my first Google Gadget.

It simply adds a My Search Funds search box to your iGoogle page. You can add the Google Gadget using the button below:

For those who don’t know, My Search Funds is a site that lets you earn a percentage of advertising revenue from your every day web searches. Currently the site uses Google, but they are developing their own aggregate search engine. You earn around 2 to 2.5p per search. Sign up here.

I’ve been using My Search Funds (the site that pays you to search) for a little while now. Up to now they have used Ask.com to provide the search results.

I was surprised today to find a Google results page when I searched. I thought I had selected the wrong search engine, but I checked, and I had used the correct search option. This is great if they are able to start to use Google, because the results are much better.

I checked the FAQ on the site, and it’s changed slightly. The wording is now:

“Our results are taken from Yahoo!, Windows Live Search and Ask (and shortly Google) and are presented to you based on how many of the search engines they appear in so we hope your results will be just as good if not better!”

This looks like they are going to use a combined results page, but no sign of that yet. I don’t know how this will affect the revenue share, but I doubt they would do anything to make them and us less money!

There was a “New Message” on my account today, but it was blank!

If Google is here to stay, there’s now even more reason to sign up for this service. My earnings are now coming up to £20 – the minimum payment level – and that’s after less than 2 months!

[Update]: I found a message on the search page:

New Improved Search Results!
Now you can use MySearchFunds to search three major Search Engines in one go! Shortly we will be adding Google to this and improving the presentation and speed of results so please stick with us.

SORRY!
We are having a few minor problems with our meta search service which should be resolved next week. In the meantime why not enjoy results from Google.

They also mention cashback shopping – in fact they are giving 50% of eBay’s revenue on winning bids already.