Following on from Bill Gates' suggestion that users should be paid to use MSN search, TechDirt hints that Yahoo might reward users to use their own search engine. Of course, users won't get paid cash, but instead they could receive free music downloads or discounts on Yahoo services. From an article on CNet:
Yahoo is considering launching a program to reward people who make Yahoo their primary search engine. Yahoo Mail users will be given early access to this program. You will receive a monthly reward if you make Yahoo your primary search engine. This means that most of the searching you do each month must be on Yahoo Search.
Well, this isn't true revenue sharing, but it does make sense - as I've said before, paying searchers in cash would make the system too easy to game. In fact, Amazon's A9 search engine has been offering discounts to users for some time now, so this is really nothing new. But it does make you wonder what the aim might be - I'm not convinced that many users would switch search engines based on a loyalty scheme. And I tend to believe that revenue sharing works best when the user puts the work in to create something of value. Creating a page on Squidoo or writing a review on Epinions takes time and creates something useful that can be monetized with ads - it makes sense that you should be rewarded for your effort. But using a search engine takes virtually no effort and doesn't earn much money except in aggregate.