Jakob Nielsen’s provocative posting on whether search engines are taking too much of the pie strikes a chord. This issue is very much on our radar here at O’Reilly, as we’re crunching lots of data from Google Book Search trying to understand its impact on our core business. (Thanks to Google for providing so much detail!) We’re comparing the daily Google search logs with our print book sales and with Safari books online (a service that essentially monetizes the ability of readers to search our books) to evaluate where search helps sales, and where it hurts. I’ll be reporting more on that subject soon.
It’s easy to see why folks with paid content businesses would be concerned about giving away too much information via search engines, but it’s really interesting to see the same concerns springing up around free content sites. Google and Yahoo! have done a good job of providing ad revenue back to small content providers with AdSense and Overture, but their model is also a threat to many prevalent kinds of advertising. And of course, the search engines get a huge amount of revenue from advertising on the index pages themselves. I tend to think that the search engines earn their keep, but I’ve got my ear to the ground, and Jakob makes a thoughtful case. From his posting:
“We’ve known since AltaVista’s launch in 1995 that search is one of the Web’s most important services. Users rely on search to find what they want among the teeming masses of pages. Recently, however, people have begun using search engines as answer engines to directly access what they want — often without truly engaging with the websites that provide (and pay for) the services.”
[via Daniel Steinberg]