PreFound.com was mentioned today in the Wall Street Journal in an article about search engine rewards programs. That's the second time the WSJ has written about PreFound.com in our 36 days since launch, so we just might be doing something right.

A thought that comes to mind as we read the article was just how different the motivations are for reward programs comparing sites like Yahoo and Microsoft to sites like Blingo or Goodsearch. Yahoo and Microsoft are motivated by full out attempts to erode Google's market share in the search space. A battle among giants, so to speak. Blingo and iWon are among sites that seem to be comfortable being niche sites that offer nothing new in search but just want to get traffic by offering prizes. The exact same results as users would get on Google or Yahoo, just with prizes attached. Goodsearch is primarily philanthropic in nature, again just using Google results, wanting to help the world, etc. A9? It's owned by Amazon, so it's all about the retail in their program. All of these programs are so different than what is motivating us at PreFound.com, it seems odd that we would have even been mentioned in the article (but we're sure glad we were).

PreFound.com wants to ensure that we get this human-indexed web search revolution going. One of the many ways we're doing that is by rewarding our best and most qualified Finders (people that are sharing the links they find with us) with the ad revenue derived from their pages and call them Featured Finders. That way, we get the best Finders we can, we motivate our regular users to share great links so they can apply to be paid Finders, and it will keep people coming so they can see great, human-shared search results. It's all done so PreFound.com can provide a unique and high quality search experience.

We have a rewards program at PreFound.com and a search site that does not use metasearch results, but utilizes human-indexing of the web. Thanks for participating.

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As of yesterday, PreFound.com allows users to share links with the PreFound.com community without the use of the PFfinder toolkit, which means "no download required". With this feature live on the site, we've implemented the two most requested enhancements to the PreFound.com site, which were RSS feeds from user pages, particularly Featured Finders, and the ability to share links with the community without the need for a download. Now, users can simply type in or paste in URL's directly onto the PreFound.com site just like many other tagging sites like Del.icio.us or MyWeb 2.0. All you need is a browser. We understand that in many corporate environments downloading and installing third-party applications takes tons of paperwork and approvals, so we're trying to be there for all you guys.

Beyond this new feature, PreFound.com now also offers a quick way to import the links you've saved on other sites and share them with our community. We've started with Del.icio.us, but will be adding Yahoo's MyWeb and Furl very soon. So if you've already saved some great links on another site that you'd like to share with us, we're trying to make that process as easy as possible.

So now, RSS feeds are available for all user pages, so if your favorite user shares new links with PreFound.com, you'll be notified immediately via RSS if you desire. And, users can now share links in two different ways without a download. We'd like to let everyone know that it's best to share Groups of associated, related links with us, rather than single links.

Of course, the PFfinder is a next-generation link gathering, organizing, sharing and tagging application, that provides the easiest and most efficient way of gathering and sharing links with PreFound.com. With PFfinder, you can save graphic links, organize them by folders, associate links with graphics even if they're not originally done that way. PFfinder will even suggest tags for your links when you share them with PreFound.com. So, needless to say, use it when you can. But if you can't, we're giving you additional paths to be part of our community.

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PreFound.com was mentioned in John Battelle’s Blog today. He mentioned we were in the Kentucky and called it “the land of Fark and Bourbon”. Well, we sure agree that Lexington’s own Fark.com can offer hours of entertainment and if you’re looking for great Kentucky Bourbon, try the new and improved Four Roses Single Barrel. It’s distilled just a few miles away in Lawrenceburg, KY and has a great Hall of Fame Master Distiller in Jim Rutledge. So John, if you ever visit us, we’ll sure give you the tour.

In another blog, another Kentucky connection crops up in Garrett French’s Search Engine Lowdown, as he gave us a quick mention today, as well. He’s a Kentucky refugee, so we always read his interesting and informative blog. Finally, we’ve been discussed in Web Metrics Guru and Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim lately, and we have great respect for their views as well.

“Social Search” is the buzz-word for a lot of what PreFound.com and some others are doing with their technology. But, we like the term “human-indexed Web” better. Our vision is for an Internet that humans have indexed by using the power of human intellect. Then make that human-indexed information available to everyone using a simple search engine metaphor.

As we’ve discussed many times here, humans are just better at relating like things together and knowing what’s the good stuff from the not-so-good stuff compared to computers, regardless of the processing power thrown at the problem.

Join the revolution. Give us a hand in indexing the web. Hey, you might even get paid.

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PreFound.com had a nice write-up in the Louisville Courier-Journal today by their business writer, Bill Wolfe. Mr. Wolfe came down to the PreFound.com Global Headquarters last week to do some interviews, take some pictures and spend some time talking about social and community search with Steve and Pat. It was really nice to have a local newspaper cover what we're doing and what we want to do in Search, and we really enjoyed Mr. Wolfe's company. He even used our term to describe our area of the country, "Silicon Holler", which always fills us with extreme jocularity. Of course, we had to hide our corn-cob pipes and moonshine, put the blue-tick hounds out back and move our "inside" furniture off the front porch to make sure we gave out the right impression. All kidding aside, it's great to talk about social search, and get the word out about our goal of human indexing the Web.

On that note, we wanted to say that we're very close to introducing a bunch of enhancements over the next few days and weeks ahead (many that we've been promising for a while). Included are things like:
- implementing the Featured Finder program (get paid to search!)
- putting in the manual input and import functions
- putting in the RSS feeds feature in the user pages
We're literally only days away, so keep listening and we'll let you know as soon as these new features are live.

Remember, with PreFound.com you never have to sign-up or sign-in to search the site. We only need you to sign-up if you want to be a Finder for PreFound.com, and share the great links that you find out on the Web with all of us. We understand that not everyone will want to do that, and many of you will only want to use the site for search. But to those intrepid souls that want to share what they've found, we salute you, and look forward to you signing up and seeing what you find. Thanks for being a part of the human-indexing revolution.

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Paying people to search and share what they've found. It's a concept that's been around for a while and has been implemented in a number of ways. And, moving into the future we're seeing a number of sites that are implementing this very concept. We at PreFound.com are now excited about our entry into that space. Starting this month, PreFound.com will institute a program that will allow our Featured Finders to reap 100% of the advertising revenue generated from their Finds Page.

How will the program work? How is it different from other pay-for-search models?

Our plan is to reward experts in their fields AND regular users who have proven they can share useful and popular material by making them Featured Finders and providing a way for them to receive the advertising revenue produced by their user page. It's a win-win for everyone. Being good at finding and sharing great stuff will mean offering a good service to our regular users and high traffic (= meaningful revenue) for the Featured Finder. Also, it gives regular users something to strive for, meaning better quality links being shared, again a win for everyone.

There is no difference in the advertising model that PreFound.com is going to offer and what you've seen on a few other sites from the perspective of Google Adsense paying directly for advertising that Google places on their user pages. The big difference is that PreFound.com only offers this to qualified searchers who will offer organized, relevant links on their pages and not just offering to pay anyone that searches and shares. Make no mistake, all user pages are important to PreFound.com, because they are the source of all the content on the site. Keep making them great and there is an opportunity to reap a reward that is actually meaningful.

The key differentiator is how the system will work in practice. In summary, on most other sites offering this type of structure they actually offer the service to ALL user pages. This will mean literally pennies (if that) to any individual member participating in the program, since user pages are often simply lists of unrelated links that the member has saved. PreFound.com, in contrast, presents member pages that contain organized, relevant Groups of sites sorted by topic and sub-topic, making them very usable to people interested in the topic. By only offering the payout to qualified, high quality members, PreFound.com provides a platform that is more valuable to the regular user and ensures a potential for significant payouts to its Featured Finders. Plus, it offers an incentive for users to share quality, organized Groups so that they might someday qualify to become Featured Finders and get paid to search.

PreFound.com is primarily a search site. Its goal is to be the first 100% human-indexed search site on the web. That is, all results in its database will be provided by, indexed by (utilizing tags) and sorted by humans. It is an entirely different model compared to algorithmic search (like Google) or even algorithmic search of tagged sites (like Wink). On PreFound.com’s user pages you will see links to organized Groups of URL’s organized by topic. So, if the topic is History, you will see Groups of links about history and within these Groups will be links all related to a particular historical subject. This makes the user page very useful to other people interested in like subject matter and will drive interested parties to that page. Compare this to just a list of links, as one would see on other sites. Again, all user pages are important to PreFound.com, because they are the source of all the content on the site. But, our plan is to reward experts in their fields AND regular users who have proven they can share useful and popular material by making them Featured Finders and providing a way for them to receive 100% of the advertising revenue produced by their user page.

This type of structure ensures that the program is much more than a gimmick. If traffic to a user page is very low, then the payout from Google will be literally pennies per month. By utilizing a program like PreFound.com is offering, featuring only qualified Finders, traffic numbers can at a level in which payouts can be meaningful.

Check out our new program. We're committed to making it a win for everyone.

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Here at PreFound.com, we're always evolving and changing in our attempts to meet the needs of the community search world. Some of the things we're working on include adding RSS feeds to the User Finds pages so you can be notified when your favorite PreFound.com users share new links. We'll be adding RSS feeds to other aspects of the site as we grow, and your comments on how to grow the site and make it more useful are very much appreciated.

We're very close to finishing the "Manual Posting" section of PreFound.com, so you'll be able to share links with all of us without downloading anything or using the PFfinder. The "Import Links" function is almost ready, as well, so you can import links from sites like del.icio.us into PreFound.com. We'll let you know the minute it goes live.

Finally, we're adding a whole new section to the site called "Featured Finders". These "Featured Finders" will be experts in their fields, some very well known, some not, that we will feature on our top page so everyone can see the types of Groups they're sharing. History, Outdoors, Business, all kinds of stuff. If you think you have some expertise in a field and would like to participate, please comment below. We'd like to talk to you.

Thanks for using PreFound.com, we're working every day to make it better.

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