Ummm... Is it really?
If the search-engine's business model is based upon sponsorship
through advertising (as many of them are or are soon to become),
any diminishment in eyeball-time for the advertising -- that
which pays for the muscular hardware and clever software -- will
be deemed non-productive by those who provide the service and
will either cause them to find ways around the abuse, to change
to a for-fee basis, or cause them to go out of business. This
is simple economics.
Brian Ulicny replies to comments that agents might not pass
advertising through to the user: "Actually, WebCompass Personal
... _does_ pass through banner ads from the search engines to
the user."
However, if the agent is to act effectively in the service of
its master, should it not proactively integrate results from as
many sources as it can parse/understand? If an agent is tasked
with searching for everything it can on a subject and places its
queries with more than one search-engine (services), how would
you suggest it might resolve the issue of integrating the
advertising on all results-pages from all engines?
Brian continues: "Our goal is to cooperate with the search
engines on this, as we have been. In this way, their
advertisers get more exposure, not less, from metasearching. So
everybody wins."
Respect to Brian but I sincerely doubt that everyone wins. The
required integration of advertising works against the interests
of the search-engines. Ads from competitors might potentially
appear on the same page, gathered from different sources, and
this reduces the perceived value to the advertiser -- which
reduces the fee the advertiser is willing to pay.
What I believe is being overlooked here is that the page that
the search-engine returns is not simply data and should not be
treated as such; it is an editorial product -- at least, this is
how those who provide the search-engine view it. If you modify
the page, reaping the benefits of the search without paying for it,
you are working at odds with those who provide this service.
If you don't concur or have difficulties with this viewpoint,
try replacing the term: 'search-engine' with 'publisher'
throughout this reply and you may begin to see it from their
viewpoint.
I would like to hear from those who run Lycos, Yahoo, et. al. on
this topic and whether or not they view themselves in this light.
Technology applied indiscriminantly without a clear understanding
of the goals of those it affects is revolutionary, not evolutionary.
And revolutions can be very expensive.
</rr> Rob Raisch, chief scientist of The Internet Company
writes weekly on the topic of Internet-enabled
advertising and marketing for Mecklermedia's IWORLD
<http://www.iworld.com/business/>
Original portions copyright 1996 by Rob Raisch