There are a number of “paid to search” sites out there.
I’ve tried a few, and have never made anything at all. A few months ago one of the ones I tried was Zot Spot. I think I made two or three searches using it, couldn’t see in the “my account” area how that contributed to earnings, and stopped using it.
Well, yesterday I received an email from them saying that my account has been credited with $0.06 for search activity two months back. Turns out their crediting cycle takes two months to process, for some reason. Probably waiting on payments from advertisers, although I’d think that would be a bit faster.
Now I wish I’d paid more attention to how many searches I’d made. I can’t imagine it was more than three, so that would make it about $0.02 for each search. That isn’t going to make me rich, but I do a lot of web searches through the course of a day, so it could add up. You also make money from your referrals’ searches.
As far as getting money out of Zot Spot, you have two options. They’ll pay into a PayPal account, or donate the money to a charity. They have a number of charities you can donate to, and if you want them to add another one you can suggest it to them.
I’ll be trying another test of this, doing all my daily searches through it. The goal will be to see how the search results compare to Google’s over a variety of searches, and to see what sort of income is possible. In a couple of months I’ll have some figures to share.
I’d like to see the update you do on this. I make “decent” change with the search thing at Inbox Dollars but I think you are limited on how many searches a day..not sure though.
I think it’s two searches a day at Inbox Dollars. And I saw an announcement lately that it was disabled until they found a new search provider.
So far ZotSpot’s been easy enough to use, although my initial feeling is that the search results don’t compare very well to Google’s. But I’ll keep using them to see what the earnings are, and fall back to Google if needed.