Forum Moderators: martinibuster
$50 for 200 clicks is a lot better than $8 for 200 clicks
I wouldn't call it a "lot better" (even assuming that I was earning that little from Google Websearch, which I'm not). The difference in revenue is quite small in the overall scheme of things for a site where search represents less than .005 of traffic. And it's easily offset by being able to offer the convenience and familiarity of Google search to readers who, according to my referrer logs, are most likely to have arrived via Google.
Too often, the user gets forgotten in discussions of "How many nickels can I squeeze out of my site today?" Maybe such short-term thinking makes sense for sites that are here today and gone tomorrow, but--in my opinion, anyway--focusing on service to the user is a more profitable strategy for publishers with long-term goals.
And one would think that for low traffic (or "low search") sites the need to "squeeze every nickel" from the sites might be very strong.
As far as any "branding" impact from having the Google logo on your search page, I doubt if there is any, and if there is it's just as likely to negative as positive.
To the average user who knows nothing about WebSearch (or AdSense for that matter) a Google search box could leave the impression that the organization either doesn't have the money or the expertise to utilize an integrated search script.
After all, a long-time major selling point of many of the third party hosted site search companies has been the fact that their service requires basically no web design/programming abilities and little or no money.
And in regards to "providing a service to the user", it is my belief that a site-search that returns ALL relevent pages for a given query is more beneficial than one that returns only the pages that Google deems important enough to index (or has actually gotten around to finding).
