You Can Get Paid to be a Tester for Google

An interesting post on the official Google Buzz blog called Test Blogger and We'll Love You and Pay You explains that you can sign up to become a potential Google usability tester (what they call "User Experience Research") for Google's Blogger software and if selected, you'll get paid at a rate that amounts to about $75 an hour. Not bad, eh?

When you sign up to become a tester, you can select up to four ways that you would be willing to be a tester for them:

• You can go to a Google office (they have them around the world) for testing
• You can have a Google representative come to your home or office to guide you through the testing and observe your actions
• You can agree to allow a Google representative call you and guide you through the testing while noting your responses as you use their software
• You can agree to be contacted to take part in an online survey about a Google product/service

Google's sign up page provides links to FAQs about the process and Google agrees to comply with all the promises it makes in its Privacy policy to protect your personal information. Additionally, the page used for signing up is a secure page. Sign up does involve providing your name, email address, phone number and city as well as some demographic information and information on the types of online applications you use, but it doesn't require you to provide any really sensitive private information, at least not at this stage of the process. The FAQs indicate that testing typically takes about an hour and a half and that Google will pay you up to $100 for your cooperation. They will not pay for any travel expenses you incur to go to them, however.

In completing the sign up form, I didn't get the impression that the paid testing was limited only to Google's Blogger software. I don't see why they might not want to use it for other products as well.

Interestingly enough, when I tried to go back to the actual blog post I got a "file not found" error. It's possible that heavy traffic may have taken the server down. Google could get flooded with requests and withdraw the offer, so I can't guarantee the integrity of some of these links, but at the very least, the Google Buzz Blog home page link should work. If you can get that far and find the post with the title I previously mentioned, you should be able to get in to register as long as registration is open:

• Google Buzz Blog Home Page
• Google User Experience Sign Up Page
• Test Blogger and We'll Love You and Pay You Blog Post