Forum Moderators: open
To me it is dangerous to talk of "free" and "paid" search engines. All are commercial entities unless it is funded by government and has no responsibility as a profit centre other than to provide a service to taxpayers or others who fund it.
We do know that Google, almost exclusively as a first tier search engine (though many second tier search engines are cottoning on), has built their core service on ranking query results on criteria other than PPC auctioning (the more you pay the higher you get ranked ala Overture), PPI or PPR (you pay to get indexed or reviewed as a prerequiste of being listed ala Yahoo directory) or PPS (Pay per spider - you pay for being spidered frequently or for guaranteeing existance in the database ala ATW, Lycos, AV, etc)
We also know that an index/ranking system that rather than being influenced by cash exchange but based on relevance and "authority" via a mix of link popularity (PR being a subset), human reviews via "authporitative (though imperfect) systems" like Y! and Dmoz, and traditional on-page text analysis provides rankings of a quality sufficient to draw mainstream eyeballs from indexes that are dependent on PPC, PFI, PPR.
However, that does not mean Google is free.
1. You can buy a sponsored link at the top
2. You can buy Adwords down the side
3. You can spend time (and therefore money) on designing a site that is "search engine (or Google) friendly" (ie: good page and site structure that focuses on your theme(s), good content therefore natural incoming links, simple clear coding.)
Google's core index, though central, can not stand by itself as a profit centre of course, but as a part of a whole it transforms into the component that drives almost all Google profit strategy. It is much more than a "loss leader", much more than a teaser, much more than a PR exercise.
All of these things means, that it is very possible that site owners can spend far more "money" on a supposedly "free" search engine than a commercial one!
There is a tendency for thngs that are "free" to be seen as low quality. I submit (though I know some people have different views) that Google retains a competitive advantage over competitors such as ATW, MSN,
RC Jordan (or was it NFFC?), made an excellent post the other day suggesting that the new My Way portal was basically a Google affiliate portal whose owners statements suggest that revenue would come mainly from Google adwords. If you look at My Way, you will see that the distinction between Adwords and the core database is much more subtle than in google.com.
This is another example of how Google can make revenue by having a non-commercially influenced core product, which grabs the eyeballs, while revenue can be gained from the "ads on the side".
In the case of My Way, it is far more likely that people will click on an Adword, making revenue for My Way, AND more revenue for Google at the same time, without putting at risk Google's brand of its google.com site. You can see the same sort of Google revenue increasing strategy through other sites that take Google as a third part provider of Adwords, AND/OR the core database (which is licensed at a price).
Unless circumstances and fortunes change greatly, Google can not change their strategy of providing the most relevant database for non-commercial searches, as that is their core product and killer competitive advantage for at least until imitators can create enough significant value added to topple them from their perch. That is why it is unlikely that they will never require payment for listing in the core database (even when they go public) while the strategic cmpetitive environment stays stable. For the same reason it is also not strategically smart for them to deliberately reduce the relevance of commercial searches so people pay for Adwords. Professional spammers is what may be causing the alleged instances of poor quality commercial or competitive searches, and imporving their spam algos is a work in progress (and may always be). They are better off just dumbing-down the preciseness of their algo in competitive search areas, and rotate these results amongst those that reach some sort of level of relevance.
Google only uses our sites for free content fodder. While our material can help them acheive a quality index it will use it. When it does not - it will not. In the meantime, both sides benefit. Just because no cash changes hands for listing in the core database does not mean "Google is free", nor that it is a public service. It just means that neither site providers nor Google have a legal contract with each other. We are opportunistic on either side.
Google's revenue will come from licensing (eg BBC, AOL), advertising/adwords clearly separated as commercial content (for people who cannot afford to be "rotated" or ranked as Google would want to rather than themselves), and finally from many clever tie ups like My Way, of which the latter is just one model.
But it will only work as long as Google retains and continuously improves the relevance and quality of their information/non-commercial searches.
All which goes to suggest that talking about "free" and "Google" in the same breath is IMHO, based on a narrow view of probable Google strategy. And by going further to say that because it is free it is inferior - is based on that faulty premise. I think we can all gain by looking at the bigger picture.
Information retrieval is part of their field, the cornerstone of their business and the core technology they leverage to make money in multiple ways: sponsored links, adwords, answers, search appliances, syndication to other search engines, etc...
However, they don't seem to look at the revenue as their first concern, in the sense that the choices they make are designed to make money without diminishing the technical value they add. The added value of this business is saving people time and reducing drudgery, in enormous, compelling amounts. This technical capability to sift and evaluate billions of pieces of information and serve up great results in fractions of a second brings eyeballs for sure, but even with the money-making devices of sponsored links, adwords, and google answers, they've been applied in a way that adds value to the end customer: it's clear they're not search results but just an additional, relevant resource. Lately they've expanded their search technology to different classes of information, serving vertical markets in a way.
Consider what they've accomplished. They've added value for Website owners who can use their on-site search, or who can license their technology for intranet search or corporate branded Website search. The've added value to browser software with the availability of their toolbar. They've added value to ODP by displaying category listings in PageRank order. They've added value to the Web in general with translation, spell checking, etc. They've developed technology to gather, evaluate, and search news. They've hosted Usenet and made it searchable. They've amassed thousands of catalogs and made them searchable to consumers. They've organized millions of images & made them searchable. Now, they're expanding on their application of distributed processing to enable mass processing of enormous amounts of data fast. This too is worth money in itself, but is approached in a way that leaves the money-making concern secondary to the creation of a new, unique, and advanced resource. Who else does this? Berkeley?
No doubt in my mind, capability, reputation and market share is the strategy that profit is expected to grow from. It's an interesting approach to running a business. I suppose it springs from the company's academic roots.
I think eventually they will establish more frequent version of their monthly crawl, now the cost of this in terms of hardware & time will be fairly heavy so they are either going to need to buy in much new hardware, tweak their current code or utilise their new grid-computing abilities (for data-analysis at least which could easily be delegated), or perhaps all of the above.
Once they have this system in place then I think they'd sell access to the latest results (but still leaving the free version of google as we know it), using the cash they gather from this to fund further tweaks, maybe testing out improved spam filters/algos on their rapidly updated results, or perhaps enabling useful extras for paying users - such as regexp based searching, the ability to permenantly exclude domains from future searches etc. (I'd imagine mostly urgent data seekers & power-users would opt for this service)
You might laugh but I sat there the other day thinking "I'd pay to get access to more recent results than this" because I wanted something which undoubtedly exists but which would have been *very* new - too new to be included in the current monthly results.
Now the last time I sat and thought about an idea like this it was "Why can't I pay someone to find the answer to this question? I'd happily pay for an expert to filter through this junk and find me the gold!" a few months later the "Google Answers" service was born.
- Tony
Tony, I see your point ('special' versions of Google probably would be worth paying for), but would Google sell straight to the consumer? I think they'd be better off concentrating on the capability, reputation and market share that Bentler mentions.
That was a wonderful summation. The main spidered index in Google is only a part of the whole. I will keep referring back to this post as I try to figure out what Google is doing and going to do in the future.
