If you are a wordsmith and a bitcoin enthusiast, this new initiative should excite you. SearchTrade, a new start-up, is set to reward internet users for the time they spend on search-engines that have been integrated with the company’s platform. So each time the user searches for information, he will be rewarded with satoshis (A satoshi is the smallest fraction of a bitcoin, 1 bitcoin is equal to 100,000,000 satoshis).
The user can even up his game by buying keywords. When others search for this keyword, he gets a return, once again in bitcoins. Keyword prices are set by the open market and SearchTrade provides an exchange platform for users to buy and sell keywords. In the pre-sale stage itself, SearchTrade has sold 389 keywords and generated 155 bitcoins (The purchase value of a bitcoin in the recent past in India has fluctuated between Rs. 14,000-15,000 approximately). Words as wide ranging as ‘get’, ‘can’, ‘find’, ‘college’ and ‘wine’ have found buyers during the pre-sale stage.
“Search is the single most important activity on the internet. Everyone does it, every day. Search drives far more traffic than any social network or viral news site, and it makes a ton of money. We’re asking people to imagine how much better the internet would be if everyone could share the benefits of that activity,” says Vishal Gupta, co-founder and CEO at SearchTrade.
“The principle behind SearchTrade is simple: give a share of financial rewards to all stakeholders involved in the search process and not just the company providing the platform. Bitcoin micropayments make this possible,” he adds.
This start-up has recreated the community-pool concept. SearchTrade’s platform will collect revenue from ad sales, keyword trading commission and keyword renewal fees and push it into the community pool. The pool will track the average income per search that the platform is able to generate every 24 hours and decide what the average pay-out per search should be. The cycle of the pool calculating the pay-out will reduce over a period of time with an increase in traffic to ensure that the pool never runs out of money. The start-up itself is also a part of the community pool. So if the pool calculates a pay-out of 100 satoshi’s on a particular search, it will get 25% or 25 satoshis.
At launch, which is expected in the coming weeks, the bitcoins collected from keywords pre-sale will be used to give payouts to the stakeholders in the pool, comprising of the search user, the keyword owner, the app developers and the company itself.
People can only use search engines integrated with the SearchTrade platform. “We will provide the option to use quite a few search engines,” explains Vishal Gupta. SearchTrade is looking for developers to build hundreds of different apps that use its search facilities.. They will earn bitcoins when a user performs a search using their app, even if the users are not signed-up SearchTrade users themselves. In order to deter ‘click farms’ (massive operations using cheap labour to game advertising systems by using them 24/7) SearchTrade limits the number of searches per user per day to 40 and also limits access to individual IP addresses.
Now there is one more way to add to your bitcoin wallet, sums up Gupta.
Click on the bitcoin logo below to buy, use or accept bitcoin. Unocoin is India’s most popular bitcoin wallet.
To read the bitcoin white paper, visit: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
