Steve Mansfield Quotations

Much like eBay and other sites, this move provides a platform for everyday users to participate in utilizing the Internet in a commercial way while providing a service to the community at-large. Under this new structure, Expert and Elite rank users will enjoy a high level of control over the sponsored links being presented on their user pages, including their content, appearance, quantity, promotion, even their costs to advertisers.

We try to present users with what other users have found.

Our plan is to reward experts in their fields along with regular users who've proven they can share useful and popular material. By elevating them to Featured Finder status and giving them the advertising revenue produced by their pages, it's a win-win for everyone.

Paying people to search and share what they've found is a concept that's gaining in popularity. Community and social search is the wave of the future, but these types of sites need to quickly build high-quality, human-indexed content, and their members are looking for the motivation to participate in this effort. Further, advertisers are anxious to take advantage of targeting large groups of users that are all interested in common products and services, which PreFound.com provides.

We want to bring regular users into the part of the Internet where they can take advantage of its commercial aspects. We're offering a platform for commercial participation.

We saw an opportunity in the community search and index space to offer something that's easy for anyone to use. Today there are a lot of good indexed sites but they are fairly vertical in areas like technical news, and not that accessible to the everyday user.

This entire case has become about public perception. If people perceive that what they are putting into a search engine isn't private, that's going to be a big negative for everyone.

It's up to you to decide if you want to commit to being part of the community. We want to be useful whether you choose to be a part of the community or not.