Why do you advertise for Goodsearch? As far as I can tell, Goodsearch itself is a for-profit LLC that makes it’s money by drawing referrals to Yahoo, by way of putting kittens and children on it’s front page and making people feel good about doing searches. They’re just trading a portion of revenue for increased marketshare.
But you’re trading time. You earn 1 cent a search; at minimum wage, that’s 5 seconds of labor time. Rough estimate of their criteria says that less than half my searches would be eligible for donation. So, in order for Goodsearch to be worth it, I’d need to be able to find what exactly I’m looking for on Yahoo no more than 2.5 seconds slower than Google/DuckDuckGo. A quick Yahoo search shows that to be off… probably by at least an order of magnitude. If you think you’d personally get better results than that though, by all means go ahead.
Time has value too, and that’s what you’re spending when you switch to Goodsearch.
Why do you advertise for Goodsearch? As far as I can tell, Goodsearch itself is a for-profit LLC that makes it’s money by drawing referrals to Yahoo, by way of putting kittens and children on it’s front page and making people feel good about doing searches. They’re just trading a portion of revenue for increased marketshare.
I recommend Goodsearch because for me it was very helpful for getting me to search more. I don’t particularly care what their business model is and in fact I hope they make good money so that I can continue benefiting from their service.
While I certainly agree that Google search is typically better than Yahoo search, I find that in practice Yahoo search is good enough most of the time, Google search is still easily available via the URL bar, and conducting any search at all is better than not doing so. Even if Goodsearch makes using search less efficient, for me it makes me use search more often, and the efficiency lost by decreasing any given search seems more than made up for by the efficiency gained by searching at all in contexts where I might otherwise forget to.
Your mileage may, of course, vary, but hey—if things don’t work it’s easy to switch your default toolbar search engine back! This strikes me as a situation that is remarkably easy to test and potentially very valuable—hence my recommendation.
Why do you advertise for Goodsearch? As far as I can tell, Goodsearch itself is a for-profit LLC that makes it’s money by drawing referrals to Yahoo, by way of putting kittens and children on it’s front page and making people feel good about doing searches. They’re just trading a portion of revenue for increased marketshare.
But you’re trading time. You earn 1 cent a search; at minimum wage, that’s 5 seconds of labor time. Rough estimate of their criteria says that less than half my searches would be eligible for donation. So, in order for Goodsearch to be worth it, I’d need to be able to find what exactly I’m looking for on Yahoo no more than 2.5 seconds slower than Google/DuckDuckGo. A quick Yahoo search shows that to be off… probably by at least an order of magnitude. If you think you’d personally get better results than that though, by all means go ahead.
Time has value too, and that’s what you’re spending when you switch to Goodsearch.
I recommend Goodsearch because for me it was very helpful for getting me to search more. I don’t particularly care what their business model is and in fact I hope they make good money so that I can continue benefiting from their service.
While I certainly agree that Google search is typically better than Yahoo search, I find that in practice Yahoo search is good enough most of the time, Google search is still easily available via the URL bar, and conducting any search at all is better than not doing so. Even if Goodsearch makes using search less efficient, for me it makes me use search more often, and the efficiency lost by decreasing any given search seems more than made up for by the efficiency gained by searching at all in contexts where I might otherwise forget to.
Your mileage may, of course, vary, but hey—if things don’t work it’s easy to switch your default toolbar search engine back! This strikes me as a situation that is remarkably easy to test and potentially very valuable—hence my recommendation.