I read a post on a board saying that I can make money when I search the Web. How does that work?

This question was asked by “writer” from Biz A Biz and My Off and On Line Dating Life on one of the message boards I frequent and was in relation to a website called My Search Funds that lets you earn a passive income when you search the Web. It’s a pretty new development and what I like is the way it integrates with your search tool in IE7 and FireFox and makes the whole process transparent to you. However, every time you click on a sponsored link, you get a share of the advertising revenue that the website has paid for that link. I went into a bit more detail on my main blog about this:

Well, here’s how it works. Search Engines earn an advertising revenue for putting sponsored links on the search results page whenever you search. Each search engine has it’s own technique for doing this and it’s one of their major sources of revenue. Now, it order to encourage traffic to their searches, search engines tend to share some of their advertising revenues with whoever sends them search traffic. So, for example, if you use the search box in Firefox to search Google and click on a sponsored link, Google will effectively pop some money in Firefox’s account to say thanks for the traffic. Another example is the search box in the top right hand corner of this site. If you “search the web” and click on a sponsored link, I make a few pennies.

This is the revenue that My Search Funds taps into, and what they do is give you 50% of the income that’s generated whenever you search the Web. Now, I haven’t really studied the Terms of Service of the relevant search engines, so ‘m not sure whether this is really OK with them, but as long as I’m getting my search results, the worst that can happen is that I don’t make anything from searching. The user experience is also seamless, thanks to the fact that the search facility integrates directly as a custom search engine in FireFox and Internet Explorer 7. You won’t even know you’re using it.

Interesting idea, isn’t it. It’s great to make something small whether you’re searching for plasma tv mounts, shocking pens or 8Gb USB Pen Drives. There’s a viral element to it too, in that if you refer people to the scheme you get a small percentage of their earnings. So, if you decide to sign up, use my referral link