Business Week On Desktop Search Economics

prostoalex writes "Business Week responds to the recent announcement by Yahoo! to join the ever-competitive desktop search field and asks whether any money will be made in giving away free utilities for desktop search. Apparently, beyond the intangible benefit of brand loyalty (which on the Internet probably doesn't amount to a whole lot), the only way to make money off the desktop search engines, as Business Week sees it, is to show related ads, which is bound to bring up some privacy issues."

Personal Search Tool

[fembots]

What we need soon (if not now) is a personal search tool (PST) which searches/records all RFID-paired (paired for security) items in your surrounding, so that you can search anything (eg remote control, old text book sealed in one of the boxes) you have ever owned/paired.

Every time you bought a new item (anything RFID-ed), you pair it with this PST, which you wear like a watch, and its location is then recorded on a 3D grid of your designated surrounding (eg house mode, car mode). And this PST will constantly monitor/update its search index.

I think search is almost indispensable now, I almost always open up google.com when I tried to find my car key, and I feel as bad as those who wanted to carjack vehicles after playing too much GTA. I must be dreaming.

There's money there?

[MLopat]

Since when has not making any money off of an idea ever stopped a .com. As we all saw during the .com explosion, most of these companies didn't have a business plan. So its no surprise the desktop version of the .com search engine has no way of making money -- yet.

Views vs. Clicks

[clinko]

Lets see their marketing plan:

So they make something so that people can get things done _faster_.

Then they put advertisements in.

Then hope they'll forget they were trying to get things done and start clicking on those ads?

Makes no sense.

That's like hoping someone will leave during a tv show to get the product they see during a commercial.

The only money they'll make from advertising is views, not clicks. And we know this doesn't work.