Hmm. Call me cynical, or even miserly. But I'm not convinced it's such a good idea. From an advertisers standpoint, fraud could be high with people clicking away with gay abandon knowing they're earning money for charity. But then, I guess you'd have to be naive not to realise that would happen so would account for it. Am I being stupid? Cheers Chris
It's a very interesting idea but in my opinion an extremely faulty one. blackbug already covered it with the high chance of fraud... people just thinking they're doing the children good.
Charity or not, a search engine needs to have good search results to become successful. I doubt that a search engine with solely sponsored listings will last long. It's a very noble idea, just not sure the implementation is that good.
There's also rectifi, a charity search engine and shopping site that was originally created back in 2002. Clickfraud is generally not a problem; users aren't normally technical enough to know what would be a high-paying keyword and what wouldn't, and most engines keep a pretty tight grip on what is and isn't acceptable from their partners.
www.goodtree.com its a good idea, and i use goodtree cause it makes me feel a bit better about myself, but realistically its never going to make millions of pounds, and if it got big like google, then it would be unrealistic to expect them to keep doing it, its like say, hey google, stop making so much money!
I really think it's a hard model to profit from because there would be rampant abuse and no one would want to advertise. I noticed the ads are similiar to the one on adsense. Also the search engine isn't really good and people wouldn't want to switch over if it offered no other benefits.