murphsy - 9:31 am on Dec 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

Shall I be the first one to say this is just Google being smart? Yea, I shall.

Google isn't paying for content. Google is paying to raise the bar, by paying for content they make it harder for a new search engine to startup. A new search engine would have to pay millions to be able to offer the same content as Google offers.

Google pays for content, just so other search engines are expected to pay for content as well. They probably hope that a lot of big websites will start asking some sort of payment for their content, which will make sure a new search engine will always have less content than Google.

We're just being played.