born2drv - 10:55 pm on Nov 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

"Google could very well decide that it isn't a shopping guide, and commercial sites (even good ones like L.L. Bean or REI) should pay for advertising..."

I disagree. If Google pulled commerical sites, then people would not search for commercial products, so they always have to be there, at least in some back-fill form.

If they just served up 100% ads for commercial results, you would not be able to find harder-to-locate merchandise only a search engine can find and Google would no longer be Google. Like the other day I needed a very specific product, a specially made small photo booth to place items in to take pictures of. Google only retuned about 50 pages, with 2 merchants who sold it. Do you think I could have found that item on Overture? No. Serving up 100% ads for commercial searches is not the way to go.

Google is much better off migrating users from search to specially made shopping searches for more general catalog-type products. I think someone mentioned Google is working on a new shopping portal type interface, using databases of large merchants to test it out.

I wouldn't be surprised in the very near future if Google had something setup where like adwords, where we bid to be placed in a shopping portal. Imagine, Instead of just supplying a destination URL, title, desc and PPC price, you also supplied a picture URL and a price. Google could display merchants selling specific products and rank them like Adwords. Like a search for "Canon G2 camera" would pull up all people paying per click on that search term, showing their photos of products, their descriptions and price, etc. I think that's where Google is headed.

If you want to avoid this type of monetization of search results on the internet, you will have to sell very unique, customizable products which are not easily priced out, or offer services which vary significantly on price (like SEO or web design). Look at Ebay, do you see people selling web design there? I guess some do, but very few compared to commerical catalog-type products. I think Google will make the next best ebay PPC type shopping portal within the next year :) And I never think they will eliminate commercial results from pure search.