Google delivers metasearch results

Google has made a deal with one of the major metasearch engine companies, Infospace, and is delivering regular search results as well as paid text ads.

Google text ads

The one major concern among search engine companies the last couple of year have been monetization.

Google has become the major search engine on the Net, mainly because of its ability to deliver high quality search results. However, it is also very good at generating revenue.

Google soon realized that banner ads was not the way to go. In fact, it has never delivered graphical advertising. Instead it followed in the footsteps of pay per click search engine GoTo/Overture and started selling plain text ads.

By introducing a pay per click model (meaning that an advertiser only pays each time someone clicks on the text links in the ads), Google has actually become Overture's major competitor in the North American part of this market.

It is now promoting its pay per click Adwords Select programs on other sites as well.

On some sites, Google is delivering text ads as well as regular results (AOL.com), on some it is delivering text ads only (Ask Jeeves) and on some search results only (Yahoo!). In any case it is able to cover both sides of the market.

Google and the metasearch engines

The major search sites are are using one search engine, or a combination of one robots-based search engine and a had picked search directory to generate regular search results.

If you are using the regular Google search form, you will -- for instance -- be presented results from the regular Google search engine, with pay per click text ads in colored boxes on the side.

There is, however, also another breed of search sites -- metasearch engines -- that generates search results by fetching results from the regular search engines.

We have one here at Pandia. The Pandia Metasearch engine will fetch results from several search engines, merge them and remove duplicates. The good thing about this is that you get the top results -- i.e. the best results from each engine -- gathered in one place.

Most of the major search engines accept this practice, probably because most metasearch engines give a reference to the source of the results, thus giving the search engines a certain publicity.

Google is the odd man out. Google has for a long time banned metasearch engines from its servers, meaning that you will not find pure Google results mixed into metasearch results. Google's argument is that the metasearch engines put a too heavy burden on the Google servers.

At Pandia we have always respected this wish, and the only Google results you find in the results from our metasearch engine are the ones delivered by Yahoo! Yahoo! uses Google results in addition to its own directory listings.

Metasearch monetization

Here comes the monetization part: Someone at Google got the brilliant idea that they could deliver search results to metasearch engines as a part of a larger package that also includes Google text ads. Make them pay!

And so they did. One of the major metasearch companies in the World, Infospace, has now been allowed to include Google listings in their metasearch results, which -- ultimately -- may make their metasearch sites more popular. They will also include Google text ads.

"InfoSpace and its meta-search users can now access information through Google's comprehensive search results and carefully targeted ads," says Omid Kordestani, Google's senior vice president of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations. "This agreement represents further distribution of our advanced search technology, while exposing our growing base of advertisers to millions of new users."

Infospace owns a several metasearch engines, including Excite, Dogpile, WebCrawler, InfoSpace and the newly relaunched Metacrawler. (At the moment Google results can only be found at some of these search sites).

Infospace is very happy about the deal:

"Google is a global leader in search and search monetization," says York Baur, InfoSpace executive vice president, Wireline and Broadband. "InfoSpace's next generation meta-search product and results improved significantly today with the addition of Google."

But is this a good move for Infospace? There is a danger that the deal may ultimately weaken the metasearch market.

Google is at the moment the only search engine that denies non-paying metasearch engines access to their database. However, the other search engine companies are following Google carefully. If Google can make money out of metasearch, maybe they can too.

The other majors may start their own pay per click programs, or they may just force the metasearch engines to pay for their results. It is very easy to block access to their servers.

Google may also -- in co-operation with their search site customers -- deny metasearch sites access to other sites that deliver Google results, again in order to make them sign a deal with Google.

It is interesting to note that Vivisimo -- one of the best metasearch engines on the Web and the only one apart from Pandia that does not include text ads -- has stopped delivering results from AOL and Yahoo!, two of the major sites using Google data.

We do not know the reason for this, but the move certainly fits the pattern.

At the moment most metasearch engines (the Infospace collection included) includes a heavy dose of pay per click text ads to generate revenue. Many of them will probably have to rely on such results only if they are blocked from the regular search engines. This will make them more or less useless for regular searchers.

And guess where their searchers will go? The word begins with a G!

More search engine news...

The Pandia Post is our free bimonthly newsletter on Internet searching, search engines and directories.

We will give you the latest news from the world of Internet exploring, useful tips on how to improve your searching skills or search engine ranking, as well as information on the development of the Pandia Search Central.

We will never give your address to any other company or organization.