Archive for the ‘searching’ tag
Amanda Watlington, Searching for Profit, on fast track to search fluency for C-level executives
Greg Jarboe, SEO-PR, interviews Amanda Watlington, CEO of Searching for Profit, about her speaking on the fast track to search fluency for C-level executives panel at SES New York. Amanda says this was the first time that SES produced a session panel for C-level executives who manage search. Amanda says because search has become more complex, particularly with universal search, it must be managed through a matrix. Amanda says the search marketer now has new tasks and responsibilities. The more a C-level executive knows how to manage search, the better they will be able to. Amanda says half of all online expenditures are spent on search. Amanda also announces that she will be taking a 4 hour training session for C-level executives on the road to Denver on April 27.
Duration : 0:2:24
Scour, the new search engine that pays when you use it
Found this over the weekend from TechCrunch, but only looked at it today. With Google now being the biggest search engine, there are a whole lot of search companies looking to unseat the Search monolith but it’s pretty difficult to since no one wants to leave Google. So instead a lot of search companies are turning to paying visitors to search and use their site. Yahoo is in the process of doing this.
But another company, Scour (http://scour.com/invite/barnard), has opened recently and has begun signups. Scour is a social search engine that aggregates Yahoo, Google and MSN search results together but allows searchers to rank and comment on sites influencing their placement in the search engine. But I’m sure you’re not concerned about how it works…
How the reward system works is you earn points, which can be redeemed for a VISA gift card. You earn 1 point for every search you make, and up to 4 points for every result you rate (you rate whether it was relevant or irrelevant). You can get a maximum of 4 points for each search, with no limit on number of points you can earn each day (they’re just starting out, I could see a hundred ways that this could be exploited). Anyways after you earn 6,500 points or more you can redeem for your $25 Visa gift card which can be used anywhere including for online shopping.
It seems like a lot of points to earn, but you get about 250 points just for registering, and if you install a toolbar in firefox or your browser you can get another 250 (so 500 points). I didn’t install the toolbar, they claim the toolbar is clean and free of spyware and I’m sure it is – but I hate installing toolbars and the likes. So I still managed to get 250 points. I search a lot and so I’ve already managed to get about 400 points.
As usual, I don’t endorse money making schemes that I haven’t tried myself or that I don’t believe are real – this seems legitimate and got attention from TechCrunch – it actually started as an elevator pitch to them. So it got Venture Capital and seems legit, although I don’t know how long before they fine-tune it or whatever – so I recommend getting in now.
http://scour.com/invite/barnard
I’m still experimenting with it, so I’ll post my findings on how well it works after a few days or a week. If anyone uses it, we can discuss ways to really harness this. It’s too early to tell how viable this is, so I’m trying to get to the minimum payout before the end of the month – shouldn’t be too hard since I’ve set it as my default browser in Firefox – and since it’s the same results as Google – relevant results aren’t a problem. If you do signup, I’d appreciate using my ref, anyways lets see if this works.
www.scour.com/invite/barnard
Duration : 0:0:58