Why searching is free

Posted by multippt

We never need to pay for finding stuff online. Searching is an invaluable tool - the most trafficked sites are search engines. Have they ever placed a price tag on search? No. They can’t place a price on it, so the best possible price would have to be - FREE! However, Google and Yahoo still earns billions from search, even though the main service itself is provided at no cost. Though, search itself does grant those who provide it with unmeasureable power - enough to actually counter the fact that searching is free.

Sources of cash without cashing in on search

Making search free completely eliminates the searching part of search engines from the profit list. However, providing other services will make up for it - by a lot. In the end, search engines still profit, though indirectly. However, if Google does charge a fee of $0.01 per search, it will net billions per month (given that there are millions of searches a day).

1. Imagine, the information collected

Information indexed is incredibly useful. So, Google can be said to know almost most of the visible Internet. Such information is useful to many people, granting a especially important feature of websites - traffic. With traffic comes ??? and finally profit! Though, collecting that much information takes money out of anyone’s pocket, and is more of an investment. There is a reason why Google has not 1 or 2, but over 50 datacenters (plus, a mountain full of bandwidth). Unless you had over $100,000 worth of funds like Google, getting a private search engine running is bound to be problematic.

Aside from traffic, some of these information is so valuable that people pay for it. Well, at least no one is doing it yet, but it’s known that Google is observing the information it collects - which is inclusive of web pages, and traffic information, but also visitor information as well.

2. In-site advertising

Webmasters will do anything to get traffic. Hoping to tap into the traffic of the giants themselves (traffic beyond anyone’s imagination), they will pay cash to get their site exposed as much as possible. Google AdWords is one of Google’s main sources of income. Advertising via AdWords is known to give plentiful traffic, but to Google it takes no cost to implement (since the ads appear on Google), giving it instant profit.

3. Advertising networks

Search engines bring in traffic, making it easier to establish advertising networks just like what Yahoo and Google has done (Live search has yet to do so). Google AdSense brings in money to the ordinary site owner. It brings in money for Google as well. After all, isn’t the advertising rates more than the payout rate? Implementing a super network like AdSense isn’t all that impossible for Google - in fact, no one actually minds participating in it (ah, the power of money).

4. Shares

Search engines turned business. People buy a stake on a search engine, and hope to earn from it (search engines are getting popular after all, making them a nice target). This is the main source of juice powering Yahoo and Google. Who wins? Google, Yahoo, and co.

5. Sparse competition

Fancy running a search engine? Well, good luck, because you will need it. Search engines are hard to maintain - hence there are not many search engines around. So, if you are at the top, you will remain there. Similarly for the opposite. Great for Google and Yahoo who were at the top of the pile since the Internet bubble. If you are the top, you have authoratian powers, and have the ability to command those who seek forth your services (because there are few alternatives), propaganda for money.

Google’s Christmas present - 6GB email space

Posted by multippt

Sounds like the GMail space meter is going extra fast these few days. By Christmas, expect to have 6GB worth of storage for your account, because that’s how fast the space is increasing. Not too bad, considering that Google is now an email service that provides the second largest mail space that is constantly growing (currently topped by Yahoo with its wonderful limitless space). Though, don’t forget that the space is shared in your Google account, so Google documents and bookmarks take up that space as well. 6GB marks yet another milestone for GMail. It is not too long ago that GMail was 3GB, which was in early 2007.

Another thing worth of note is that Google is doing up some doodles for everyone’s pleasure (while Yahoo is doing flash animations).

Why Microsoft *could* have taken over the Internet

Posted by multippt

Microsoft’s monopoly of the PC market can be depicted by this phrase: “All your computers are belong to us”. Microsoft has the ability to take over a market at its discretion - talk about the endless potential of money. Well it has the ability, but so far used a fraction of it on a few of it’s strengths.

Microsoft? Take over the Internet?

If Microsoft managed to nearly take over the browser market (in the process completely eradicating some of its rivals), why not the Internet? Taking over the browsers market is one step for Microsoft’s empire manipulation of the Internet - after all, to even use the net, you need an Internet browser right? Quality is not a choice, Internet Explorer was and is “bad” but people had to use it, maybe until the advent of Firefox. So, if step one was the browser market, what is step 2? Right, the Internet. Currently, the Internet is governed by the top 10, the most prominent ones are Yahoo and Google. Where does Microsoft come in? It’s still in top 10, but the top 2 are the ones who command the others, and have the ability to bend webmasters and Internet surfers to their will.

Why Microsoft could have taken over the Internet
 

1. Microsoft ain’t trying hard enough

Great! Now that Microsoft has its very own search engine, it might be able to compete with Google and Yahoo right? Wrong! Yahoo and Google are superior to Live search, simply because they are superior. Microsoft didn’t have a chance - poor marketing of Live search is a path to its demise. In addition, Microsoft doesn’t disclose a little how it’s search engine influence results so webmasters had trouble getting their sites to work well for the poor crawler (as usual, Microsoft’s proprietary work rarely gets disclosed). Money is not a problem for big Microsoft. After all, isn’t Microsoft’s earnings 9 times that of Yahoo?

2. Microsoft didn’t buy Yahoo

Yahoo is a big company. Microsoft is a behemoth. Microsoft can buy Yahoo if it wishes to, and if it did, part of the Internet will be almost in the direct control of Microsoft (or at least Microsoft has a say in it). Fortunately or unfortunately, Microsoft has no plans to buy Yahoo over. Besides, even if it did, Microsoft will be considered as attempting to monopolize the Internet (Microsoft was fined for attempting to monopolize the software market; particularly OSes, Internet browsers and music players). By acquiring Yahoo, Microsoft will be near invincible and is a direct rival to Google, that is if Microsoft didn’t screw anything up.

3. Microsoft didn’t buy Google

Google is the top Internet giant. Never mind Alexa, Google is the top - considering it’s successful sites and massive buy-overs of super sites like Youtube and Feedburner. If Microsoft acquired Google, the Internet is Microsoft’s. Well, that is “if”.

4. Microsoft didn’t support open-source

If Microsoft were to bribe support open source projects like Firefox, it may actually help Microsoft in the long run. Google for example arranged a deal to make the homepage of Firefox point to Google, thereby directly increasing Google’s popularity. If Microsoft were to do that (which is now too late of course), Live search will get a boost in user base.

5. Microsoft didn’t made Live search earlier

Being a pioneer has its advantages. Microsoft decided to make Live search (known as MSN search in 1999) much later. Again, back to point #1, Microsoft didn’t try hard enough, so MSN search lagged way behind Yahoo. Moving to Live search did give it all the hype, but Live search is treated as simply an alternative search engine rather than a main one. By making it much later, Microsoft could not implement it as a home page on it’s browsers during its peak (remember: Microsoft almost took over the browser market for a while). If it did, Microsoft had a huge advantage. Microsoft only implemented Live search as the homepage a little too late, which by then most Internet users have become loyal to Yahoo and Google.

Windows Live search: No longer indexing Google ads

Posted by multippt

Whew, sounds like Microsoft didn’t anticipate that it’s own crawler will be indexing Google AdWords ads. And no, don’t get the idea that it will help just because your ad link “gets more exposure” (oh wait, it does help). It’s pretty interesting to note that even those ads can rank up fairly well for certain terms.

The problem is this: In an attempt to increase the relevancy of the search results, Live search now includes links pointing towards pages blocked by even robot.txt files (well, it only told it to not crawl the page, but didn’t tell it to not count the stuff inside the links pointing to the page). Again, it shows that Microsoft ain’t following the robot rules completely, because those ads are only present in Google search results, which are disallowed to be indexed by the robot.txt file. Let’s hope other ads won’t pop up as well. Though, this wasn’t the first time it has happened before… :)

Well, at least those ads stopped appearing in the results for now.

Google removes supplemental index

Posted by multippt

Google has recently annouced the discontinuation of the supplemental index. Ok, maybe not a total removal, but more of a improvement to the results. This index is, as it’s name implies, is a supplement to the main index (also known as the primary index). The supplemental index is sort of like a second index, except that pages in the index is treated on a lower priority compared to those on the main index - i.e. they are indexed less and won’t appear in most search results (unless there are very few results), so this is one index you will not want to have too many of your pages appearing in it (the supplementary index also has an alternate name).

Since Google has announced the termination of it, all pages in the supplemental index has been “promoted” to the same level of priority as the other documents, increasing the amount of relevant results (and unfortunately irrelevant ones as well). Might be a great thing don’t you think? The removal of the supplemental index means that more results will be included, and so perhaps more things such as pages in other languages will get a better chance of being picked up by searches. Probably a nice thing for most webmasters.

The change is carried out on a step by step phase - dating back to July 2007, so you can say Google has been planning for this for quite a long time. Thus, the removal of the supplemental index is not too surprising since Google actually prevented people from “predicting” how much of their site is in the supplemental index a few months ago.

Google dishes out new AdSense format

Posted by multippt

Sounds like Google is experimenting with a new format which is able to show more ad units using the same amount of space. Expect the new 336X280 pixel and 180X150 pixel units to be coming soon. This format is similar to the original ads, except that it shows 4 ads at once instead of the usual 3 or 2. It might look a little jumbled up, but at least it does show more ads.

The format is not listed in the official Ad formats page, but it is being tested. There is still a low probability of it appearing amonst your ads, so it’s a perfect opportunity to have a screenshot when you do see one.

Google changes name of Product search, again! Sort of…

Posted by multippt

Google has just renamed its product search from “Products” to “Shopping“, giving Google’s product search 3 names to work with (with the first one being “Froogle”). That change is only on the main page of Google. 

I guess Google might be trying to reach out to some nice would-be shoppers to use it’s product search feature, seeing that Christmas is not too far away. After all, why did it promote Product Search to the front page in exchange of Google video (though not too much of a problem now that Google has Youtube)? Well, at least it makes Product Search the second beta Google service to appear in the Google top bar.

A few others notice it, but it’s just a change in a word on the main page of Google; no big of a deal is it? But if almost no one noticed it, Google should try to make it more visible…