Google considers subscription services

(Oct. 26 2001) Google is pondering the inclusion of additional specialized subscription based search services.

Google is at the moment the only major search engine that does not offer some form of paid inclusion -- i.e. a service that lets you pay to get webpages indexed regularly.

If it started gathering fees for quick updates it would have to provide some added value for these customers. The traditional way to do this would be to do less frequent updates for non-paying sites, but that would reduce the quality of the index. That's risky, because quality and relevance is what has made Google such a huge success.

Another way of gathering search engine revenue is to sell highly ranked search engine results, i.e. so called pay-per-click results. All the other dominating search engines do provide such results, often masked as "featured listings". The main providers of such ads (because that's what they are) are Overture (GoTo) and Find What.

Google has so far chosen not to include pay-per-click listings -- again in order to preserve its reputation as the high quality search engine.

It should be noted though that it does offer advertising that comes very close to pay-per-click listings, though. By using its Premium Sponsorships and AdWords programs you may buy small text ads that are triggered whenever someone searches for a relevant keyword phrase. Even if these ads are not disguised as regular results, the effect is more or less the same.

In spite of its huge success -- the traffic has nearly tripled in the last year -- Google is vulnerable, as i depends on advertising for some 70 percent of its revenue. Although text based advertising is much more popular than old-fashioned banner ads, Google would clearly like to find some additional way of earning money, and what better way that offering additional search results for a certain fee?

Little brother Northern Light has proved that this is possible. This search engine has not got the same bad press as Infoseek/Go, NBCi, Excite and AltaVista, because it is actually coping with the drop in advertising revenue by offering academics and companies access to a large database of over 7100 full-text journals, books, magazines, newswires, and reference sources (some 25 million individual full-text documents).

At Northern Light most Special Collection documents range in price from $1.00 to $4.00 per article, with a few "higher value sources" costing more.

Google is now rumored to be considering a similar move. This certainly makes sense, as Google already has the technology needed to index a lot of different file formats, Microsoft Office documents included. It has already included Adobe Acrobat PDF-files in its regular search engine database, and offers special topic searches (like universities or special technologies) for free.

According to CNET Google is evaluating new "vertical markets" as a means of increasing revenues. The discussions are at an early stage though, and one should not expect these services to be provided shortly.

We will guess that possible candidates for inclusion in "vertical" subscription based Google indexes will be scholarly periodicals, intelligence reports, business magazines and company information.

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