Thought about metasearch engines

[Thomas Dowling]

Just a thought about the thread on metasearch engines:  Lycos, Excite,
AltaVista et al. are increasingly using their search engines to leverage
their moves into the Portal business ("you came to search, stay to read our
headline news and movie reviews...").  Whatever success they have doing this
is then used to draw advertisers, who in turn end up funding the search
engine, along with everything else.

So, if some metasearch engine really takes off (say, it gets built into a
new operating system), aren't the search engines whose results get forwarded
more or less obligated to try to cut off the meta engine's supply of free
search results?

Thomas Dowling
Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu