Paid Search Engines
In recent years there have been several sites paying users to perform searches. You may have heard of a few - HomePages Friends and Scour.com. While most sites keep the earnings they get from users performing searches, these share the commission with you as an incentive. But how do you know whether you're opting for the right one? Are their payouts good?
This site is a guide and comparison for the different paid search engines out there.
HomePages Friends - myhpf.co.uk
HomePages Friends (previously known as My Search Funds) is a paid search engine site which uses Yahoo. Once you sign up with them, you will get paid £0.01 (or $0.02 USD) for every search you do using Yahoo. You can potentially earn more if you introduce users to the site since you will get paid a commission of their earnings, this works exponentially up to 3 levels.
They have a calculator for determining how much you can earn here. Currently, there is a cap of 100 searches a day. HomePages Friends splits it's earnings with the users 50/50. Out of all the paid search engines, this has the highest payout but it only works if you search with Yahoo.
Advantages
- 3 level referal rate
- High payrate - £0.01 or $0.02 per search
- All countries allowed
- Integrated searchbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox
- Multiple payment options: PayPal, Cheque and International Bank Transfer (IBAN)
Disadvantages
- Only Works with Yahoo
- High Payout level - £20 ($40)
Conclusion
Well, out of the paid search engine programmes seen so far, this is the highest paying. The main downside to this is that it only pays users for using the Yahoo search engine. This is fine if you use Yahoo anyway, but if you use firefox and you are used to Google you might want to consider Scour.com. On the other hand, the Yahoo homepage pretty much has everything such as news, mail and shopping all in one so changing your homepage to Yahoo.com may be a good idea if you want to use myhpf.co.uk
Another downside to this is that the minimum payout is £20, which equates to around $40 USD. For a normal searcher, this would normally take around 6 months of searches before you get a payout. You will earn more however, if you refer your friends and family members to the site. This is another big benefit about myhpf.co.uk - they will pay you a commission up to three levels down. This means that they pay you a commission of whatever your friends and your friend's friends and your friend's friend's friends earn. This can potentially be alot if you have a wide social circle but it depends on how big your social circle is.
Scour - scour.com
Scour is another paid search engine which launched in July. The site allows users to enter a search term and it will display Google, Yahoo and MSN results on one page. This is pretty handy if you're looking for something specific and the best thing is you can get paid to search on all three search engines. Users also get paid by commenting and voting on search results. It tallies up your payment on a points system with 26 points equalling $0.01.
The disadvantage is that it has a low pay rate at $0.01.
Advantages
- Can use the 3 major search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN
- All countries allowed
- All countries allowed
- Integrated searchbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox
- Lower Payout level - $25
Disadvantages
- Low pay rate - $0.01 per search
- 1 payment method - Visa Gift Card
Click here to sign up
Conclusion
As can be seen, Scour.com pays less than myhpf.co.uk, but it has one big advantage: it pays out for using Google, Yahoo and MSN - so you don't have to think about using another search engine.
Below is a comparison of the pros and cons of each:
| Myhpf.co.uk | Scour.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Pay rate | $0.02 | $0.01 |
| Minimum Payout | $40 | $25 |
| Search Engine(s) | Yahoo | Google, Yahoo, MSN |
| Payment method | PayPal, Cheque, Bank Transfer | Visa Gift Card |
| Referal levels | 31 | |
| Countries | All | All |
| Plugin | IE, Firefox | IE, Firefox |
| Sign up | Myhpf | Scour |