We're experimenting with a new way to power our Datafiniti search engine. Essentially you get paid for running a distributed web crawler through any Chrome Extension.
"Nothing stopping the developer from paying out to users as well" - this is absolutely ridiculous; of course a developer with absolutely no payment infrastructure is going to start relaying these ill-gotten gains back to users. It just doesn't work like that.
There is something in this I don't like. Can't quite put my finger on it.