Coming Soon – the Death of Search Engines?

"What does the future hold for search engines and searchers?

There is little doubt that both Google and Yahoo will continue to grow their portals. At the present time, generating as much ad revenue as possible is the only viable business model for a free service that depends on huge amounts of traffic for success. The only other pure-search player of significance is Gigablast, and its principals care about improving search query interpretation...Gigablast doesn’t have enough going for it to create a mass migration away from Google. The other major player, Microsoft, is expected to enter the search arena in the coming months with a major new product. What that will look like is anyone’s guess, but given Microsoft’s deals with LexisNexis, Gale, and other paid content suppliers, it is reasonable to assume that Microsoft may expect to earn revenue from its search site – not exclusively from advertising, but also by selling (probably cheap) paid content on demand."