Followup to: Use Search Engines Early and Often
Last year, I posted about using search engines and particularly recommended GoodSearch, a site that donates one cent to a charity of your choice whenever you make a (Bing-powered) search via their site.
At the time, some seemed skeptical of this recommendation, and my post was actually downvoted-- people thought that I was plugging GoodSearch too hard without enough evidence for its quality. I now want to return to the topic with a more detailed report on my experience using GoodSearch for a year and how that has worked out for me.
What is GoodSearch?
GoodSearch is a site that donates one cent to a charity of your choice whenever you make a search using their (Bing-powered) service. You can set this search to operate in your browser just like any other.
GoodSearch for Charity
During a year of using GoodSearch, I raised $103.00 for MIRI through making searches. This number is not particularly huge in itself, but it is meaningful because this was basically "free money"-- money gained in exchange for doing things that I was already doing. In exchange for spending ~10 minutes reconfiguring my default searches and occasionally logging in to GoodSearch, I made 103 dollars for MIRI-- approximately $600/hour. As my current earning potential is less than $600/hour, I consider adopting GoodSearch a highly efficient method of donating to charity, at least for me.
It is possible that you make many fewer searches than I do, and thus that setting up GoodSearch will not be very effective for you at raising money. Indeed, I think this is at least somewhat likely, as last time I checked owever, there are two mitigating factors here:
First, you don't have to make all that many searches for GoodSearch to be a good idea. If you make a tenth of the searches I do in a year, you would still be earning around $60/hour for charity by configuring GoodSearch for ten minutes.
Second, I anticipate that, having created a GoodSearch account and configured my default settings to use GoodSearch, I have accomplished the bulk of this task, and that next year I will spend significantly less time setting up GoodSearch-- perhaps half that, if not less. This means that my projected returns on using GoodSearch next year are $1200/hour! If this holds true for you as well, even if setting up GoodSearch is marginal now, it could well be worth it later.
It is also of course possible that you will make many more searches than I do, and thus that setting up GoodSearch will be even more effective for you than it is for me. I think this is somewhat unlikely, as I consider myself rather good at using search engines and quick to use them to resolve problems, but I would love to be proven wrong.
GoodSearch for Personal Effectiveness
Perhaps more importantly, though, I found that using GoodSearch was a very effective way of getting me to search more often. I had previously identified not using search engines as often as I could as a weakness that was causing me to handle some matters inefficiently. In general, there are many situations where the value of information that can be obtained by using search engines is high, but one may not be inclined to search immediately.
For me, using GoodSearch solved this problem; while a single cent to MIRI for each search doesn't seem like much, it was enough to give me a little ping of happiness every time I searched for anything, which in turn was enough to reinforce my searching habit and take things to the next level. GoodSearch essentially created a success spiral that led to me using both search engines and the Internet itself much more effectively.
Disavantages of GoodSearch
GoodSearch has one notable disadvantage-- it is powered by Bing rather than by Google search. When I first tried GoodSearch, I expected search quality to be much worse. In practice, though, I found that my fears were overblown. GoodSearch results were completely fine in almost all cases, and in the few situations where it proved insufficient, I could easily retry a search in Google-- though often Google too lacked the information I was looking for.
Summary/tl;dr
After a year of using GoodSearch, I found it to be both an effective way to earn money for charity and an effective way to motivate myself to use search engines more often. I suggest that other users try using GoodSearch and seeing if it has similarly positive effects; the costs of trying this are very low and the potential upside is high.
Why not? Genuine question, because my job is pretty much nothing but cost-benefit analysis of fixed-cost projects which pay off a small amount every year, and the calculation you describe as 'not how you do cost-benefit analysis' is almost exactly how I would do a cost-benefit analysis of this kind (although I wouldn't phrase it as $1200 / hour because that's clunky, I'd probably talk about a percentage return on investment). I rate the probability that I am wrong here as extremely small, but if I am wrong I really need to hear it, and have the problem explained to me.
If I were totally comitted to getting the most accurate answer I'd add a couple of complications that katydee doesn't - for example;
I would discount against the possibility that GoodSearch no longer exists in 2040 (and discount future earnings more generally),
I would try to estimate a probability that I'd need to reconfigure my settings in the future, and estimate timings for that (if both Chrome and GoodSearch are still around in 30 years I'd be surprised!)
But ignoring these complications for the moment I think it is totally accurate to say in 2040, "I have donated $16,000 to charity since 2014". I think the $1200/hour rhetoric is unhelpful, because it implies that you could earn another $1200 by working another hour, when in fact you don't actually ever earn $1200 (well, I suppose you do after about a decade) and you can only earn the money over a very long period of time. I would probably describe it as a 'Nominal Rate of Return of X% per annum over Y years', compared to a nominal rate of return of almost zero percent per annum if I don't search with GoodSearch (it is possible my advertising generates a multiplier effect which has a tiny positive externality on me, but I'd expect this to be almost totally negligable)
Where is the error in my reasoning?
Well, if we were to approach this seriously, there a few more factors in play.
On the benefits side you need to estimate the expected length of time that this scheme will be operational. It's not just GoodSearch being around, it also them continuing to offer the same rate (and the price of generic eyeballs has been going down since as far back as I can remember and shows no signs of stopping) while providing adequate service.
You also need to figure out the appropriate discount rate since $1 in 2040 is quite different from $1 in 2014.
On the costs side you ne... (read more)