jomaxx - 6:14 pm on Jan 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

Going to pay-per-search would reduce total searches by a huge proportion (my guess: 95-99%), and as a result their Adwords revenue would almost disappear.

Not only that, but Google's single biggest asset is probably its current dominance of Internet searching. I'm sure the people backing Google's hypothesized IPO have thought of all kinds of ways to generate revenue streams from that, but if they went PPS that would disappear as well.

I'm not saying PPS could never work in any context, but IMO services that could be branded as "premium" search tools would be better candidates - i.e. images, news, newsgroups, froogle.