There’s a new paid-to-search site in town, called Scour.
In Scour, you earn points by performing web searches. Scour pulls results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and ranks them according to the individual rankings on those search engines (it also shows you what each page ranked on each). This alone makes it useful to get a snapshot of where your site ranks for different keywords in each search engine.
What makes Scour different from the other paid-to-search services is that users can comment on individual search results, and vote them up or down. Enough user votes up or down, and that result will display higher in the search results.
So your first act after joining Scour should be to do searches on the keywords you want your sites to rank well for, and then vote them up. It’s a small start, but if you encourage others to do the same, you should get a better ranking on Scour. What will that be worth? It’s hard to tell, it’ll depend on how popular the service becomes. Paid-to-search sites have been popular in the past, so this one might do well.
You can convert your points into prepaid VISA gift cards, mailed to you. So this should work for international users, too, which is a common complaint with any get-paid-to site. I’m not sure how many points convert into how many dollars.
And, of course, you earn a portion of the points your referrals earn, so like all GPT sites, you earn the most by both using the site and getting referrals.
So, join Scour, vote your own sites up, and then do a search on “Online Opportunity”, and leave a comment about this blog.
P.S. I was out of town this weekend, so haven’t had time to continue the Traffic Wave tutorial. It’ll return Wednesday.
I have always been a bit doubtful of all these paid to search sites, but this is a useful review so thanks for it. If you do have any updates or info about how good or bad the site it do let us know.
This is interesting. Have you tracked the traffic coming from services like this to see how effective it is?
I really appreciate your detailed review on paid- to search- site. I think Scour is worth having a try. Did anybody use this site and wish to share his experience with us?
I am skeptical of these types of sites. I have used similar sites, but they never seem to work, no matter how good they seem. I see a couple people have asked how good this site is, but no one has responded. I am wondering the same thing, if anyone has tracked the stats and seen results. I have used very similar sites and they all claimed they were great, and they seemed like they should work, and they had video testimonials raving about the site, but I have never personally been successful with them.
Hi Shawn, the main problem with these sites is that to earn anything significant (e.g. to get a payout) requires a huge volume of searches, or a massive number of referrals. While I could manage the referrals, each of my referrals who couldn’t would probably get discouraged over time and drop out.
To make this sort of thing work, it needs to regularly reward the people doing the searches, not just the people getting referrals. At the end of the day, if you aren’t getting something out of it, you’ll probably head back to Google.