How We're Integrating Web Monetization into The Search Engine Experience

For those of you who are not familiar with Infinity Search, we are a new web search engine with a focus on privacy, customization, and efficiency.

The landscape of internet monetization has been changing in the last couple of years and websites no longer need to strictly rely on advertising for their revenues. Our team came across Web Monetization and Coil recently and they are bringing a completely new way of monetization to the internet. The Web Monetization standard allows for streaming of micropayments to webpages based off of a single HTML element in the page. Coil is the first company to implement this standard where users pay Coil $5 per month and Coil distributes this money over micropayments to the websites that users visit that have the web monetization HTML element.

What we do at Infinity Search with this is detecting if a visitor is a Coil user and if they are, we do not display any ads to them since they are streaming payments to us directly (through Coil).

We decided to make an index of webpages that are using the web monetization standard. Anyone can use it here but its category is hidden to everyone except Coil members. This index started as us manually adding sites that had implemented the standard but our crawlers check every webpage that it visits to see if it has the monetization standard element in the HTML, so this index is growing naturally as well.

This website, HackerNoon, was one of the first to adopt the standard and many content creators on this website receive compensation through Coil!

Since we are aggregating all sorts of webpages that have this standard, something cool that we can do is share our revenue with sites that show up in our search results. We do this in our web monetized index where there is a 50% chance that we will receive the revenue and then the other 50% is distributed among the results with the higher ranking results having a higher probability of them being selected for receiving the revenue. We'll even show you the code for how we do it here:

def probabilistic_revenue_sharing(pointers):
    infinity_pointer = '$ilp.uphold.com/AzDfkEqpUKeb'
    pointers = [infinity_pointer] + pointers
    weights = []
    count = 0
    for pointer in pointers:
        if count == 0:
            weights.append(.5)
        else:
            weights.append((1 / (len(pointers) - 1) / 2))
        count += 1

    return random.choices(population=pointers, weights=weights, k=1)[0]

Our main source of revenue at this moment is from advertising with the Ethical Ads network and it is one of the only ad networks that doesn't track its users. Some people really just don't like ads, however, and we also provide a pro subscription to users who would prefer to directly support us and not ever view any ads, along with some other features.