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Comment by crystalarchives | Hacker News Reader

Hm, where I am breaching Google TOS? I've read through it pretty carefully, although I'm not a lawyer, and I can't find anything besides potentially incentivizing the clicking of ads. That is up to their discretion, I'm going to assume it's okay unless they warn me. I've put up a disclaimer though, thanks for pointing that part out.

I'm able to disclose my earnings though Section 7 of the TOS (http://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms) which states:

"You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program."

and I can post my donation receipts for verification. Obviously, this won't happen until after I get the AdSense check, but there's nothing I can do about that for the first month. There won't be many users starting off though, so even if I were a greedy scumbag I wouldn't make too much, and if I actually do as I promise more users will hopefully show up.

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I hear you =) Here's a quote from the email (Dec 7th 2006):

Thanks for following up with us and removing the phrase "The more you search the more we give".

Unfortunately, we’re still unable to approve your application for the AdSense program because we found that you are offering incentives to users to perform searches in order to benefit third-parties. This activity is prohibited by AdSense program policies.

AdSense does not currently permit sites that offer financial incentives to users to perform searches. This includes both direct incentives ("we pay you two cents for every search") and indirect incentives to third-parties ("we donate to charity every time you search"). There are a number of reasons for this policy decision, most notably our inability to verify the accuracy of any claims. While we have no doubt that you intend to donate a portion of proceeds to the charities listed on your site, we have no way to verify this with all partners.

For additional questions, I'd encourage you to visit the AdSense Help Center (http://www.google.com/adsense_help), our complete resource center for all AdSense topics. Alternatively, feel free to post your question on the forum just for AdSense publishers: the AdSense Help Group (http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help).

Ouch, I see it now:

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...

"May not compensate users for viewing ads or performing searches, or promise compensation to a third party for such behavior"

I guess this is why there are other sites that use Yahoo as the search engine for the same purpose... Thanks for the heads up, I'll let you know if I find some way around it. I think I'll leave it up and wait until Google contacts me before switching to Yahoo.

Who knows, maybe I'll write something that allows verification of donations for charities. That might be a good non-profit in itself.

Sure thing - good luck - they're pretty quick =)

What I was working on morphed into http://www.tunesfortrees.com/ once we realized GoodSearch.com owned the search space.

Your next thought was my next thought, verification for charities would be great to have as long as you could get Google approval, and as long as enough people cared =)

Genius man, it's a good idea and looks fantastic.

Good luck to you, too!

btw - I think this is why GoodSearch.com uses Yahoo

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