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I know GoogleGuy said not long ago they weren't thinking of Pay For Inclusion, but i just think with the situation they have now, PFI doesn't seem to be that far away, PageRank calculation on the fly inclusion in a few hours, all seem to be everyday now anyway.
Watcha all think?
You can do 1. PFI while allowing non-PFI sites in the old way, or 2. PFI-or-nothing--pay or sit on the sideline.
2 is in direct conflict of Google's mission, "making the world's information universally accessible" etc.
1 exists at the lowest end of the market, with the least savvy users. Still requires a support staff per the previous posts.
Yeah, looks like a real winning line of business ;) Plus it has the stench of the desperation of publicly traded internet companies working every available revenue stream.
I would love to hear BigDave run numbers for Google API licensing ;)
By moving commercial products to their own engine, the conflict of interest that upsets so many people is largely removed. People looking to purchase products will use Froogle. People selling products will pay to be in Froogle.
Isn't the idea to provide a product-centric view of the main index and monetize through AdWords? Paying to be in Froogle and paying to be in AdWords on a Froogle result seems like double-dipping.
I don't really think Google would stand to make a lot of money on the API, but it would be valuable for them to offer a high volume pay version of the API as a way of gaining market share.
It gives them another way to make their users happy, and to pass along the cost for those that would like to use more than the 1000 searches/day normally allowed.
The API helps to keep webmasters in the google fold.
Here is why:
BRAND! Yes brand. Google is a free high quality search engine and because of that they are the largest. They are #1 in the "free high quality search engine market".
Since there are many other search engines that have some sort of pay per click or inclusion. If google were to switch to a ppc or ppi model they will move themselves into a category that is dominated by another company (like overture) or has massive competition. (Overture already is titled the best ppc engine and it would be too risky as well as hard for anyone to dethrone the king.)
To me, it dosen't matter really. Because another free search engine will come along, willing to make some cheap deals, and webmasters will flock to. All google would have done is just got out of their throne and walked away and another will slip in it's place. And this free search engine will claim title #1 in the "free high quality search engine market" that google so proudly owned at one time.
Many companies really do cut their own throats by doing this. They claim #1 in a category and then try to switch or expand into another. This saturates, and destroys the meaning of their brand. Google should stay focused on the free quality search engine and they will be king for a long while.
Even if MSN starts spidering and indexing for free, MSN will still have to dethrone the KING which is google. That is hard to do. The thing is, will netscape or aol, want to show MSN results! Doubt it. Yahoo picked up inkitomi so that is out. It will be fun to see what happens!
