Rob Hof points to a search engine called AnooX, which claims to pay users to search. What's more, it appears to have a human voting system built on top of a regular search engine, just like my beloved Wink. I think revenue-sharing with users is great and most of my future projects will be aimed in this direction. But there's something not quite right about AnooX. Maybe it's the clunky interface. Maybe it's the fact that a lot of the text on the site doesn't read well. Maybe it's that you have to enter your credit card information (eek!) to sign up as a "voting member".
However, I did manage to sign up as a regular user, which means I will supposedly get paid an average of $100 a year for using AnooX as my main search engine and clicking on a paid link once in a while. Obviously there will be the issue of click fraud here - clicking on ads to earn yourself more cash. I'm not sure if voters get paid, but if they do that opens up a whole load of possibilities for fraudulent activity - as a webmaster, you could pay voters to vote up your site in the listings, and vote down your competitors. So while I like the idea in principal, I'm not sold on the execution.
In addition, the site features this ridiculous spiel:
AnooX is fundamentally a better Search Engine than Yahoo! or Google because it is based on a machine generated and people (that is you) driven search generation method. That is AnooX search results are democratically generated.
On the other hand Google and Yahoo! are based on machine only generated search results, where the knowledge of the people (that is you) are ignored. Because their search results are generated in some mysterious ways where the people (that is you again) have no say or input in the search results. Put simply, they represent information (search result) dictatorship. That is they tell you here is the search results, "just take it" - you cannot do anything to change it.
Haha! Believe it or not, the bold text is theirs, not mine. Take a look. These guys are seriously claiming that Google is a dictatorship! I know Google is evil, but come on! We all know that Google is actually just a less explicit voting system, with each link counting as a vote - it's completely democratic. Seriously guys, you need to take this text off your site right away.
I really like the idea of revenue sharing with users (it's something I'm actively pursuing), but we've got to bear in mind that a lot of these ideas were tested to destruction back in the heady Web 1.0 days. So while a paid search engine could indeed work out (and I think it will eventually), I'm not convinced that AnooX has got it quite right yet.
By the way: Rob seems to suggest that AnooX is a new site, but a quick Google search and a look at the Internet Archive reveals references from back in 2004. It's possible that the domain is under new ownership, or simply being relaunched.