Got sent an email from someone at work today about Oblatoo, a "charitable search engine". Very simple idea - the site has a list of charities who get 1p every time you make a search. The search results are "powered by Google" so the site must just pass through your search input to Google and then feed it back through the Oblatoo site.
Very interesting (and commendable) idea but there is at least one obvious issue. Isn't it vulnerable to automated search scams? In the terms and conditions page, the site owners say they will monitor usage and pull the plug on any obviously automated behaviour. But what if someone set up a "bot", using some clever programming, that was automated but looked manual? Searching at random intervals, from a list of clearly delineated topics with the odd "funny" thrown in - shouldn't be too difficult (I could probably rig up something to do that in Perl, for example, and I'm not even a good programmer). If there ends up being a lot of this going on then advertisers (who are presumably funding this? Someone must be) are going to throw in the towel.
Anyway, I'll start using it and see what happens...
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