[WEB4LIB] No advertisement search engine sites

[Nick Arnett]

At 08:45 AM 12/7/99 -0800, morganj at iupui.edu wrote:
>I was reading the report of the first Search Engine conference, at
>http://websearch.about.com/internet/websearch/library/blses99.htm
>and saw in the Search Engines Speak panel that one company talked about
>carefully separating its commercial operation from its indexing.  However
>successful they might be, I began to think that libraries would benefit
>from a Yahoo-like search service that wasn't powered by commercials...

The revenue for banner ads has dropped so low that I doubt we'll see many 
more new ones coming along that are advertising-based.  We're building 
search services and still working on our business model, but we're hardly 
even considering banner advertising -- either as a way to make money or as 
a way to bring people to our site(s).

It's expensive to set up any sort of large searchable archive, so when 
there aren't ads, you can usually expect to pay for at least part of the 
service or have it sponsored in some way by an organization that has a 
vested interest in the subject... which begs the question of objectivity, 
of course.  We certainly found, in talking to quite a few special 
librarians in the Bay Area recently, that there's plenty of suspicion about 
Web-based sources regarding their completeness and objectivity.

As long as I'm posting, I'll also mention that we have added Commerce 
Business Daily to invisible.net and the U.S. copyright database will be 
available any hour or day now.  All of this is truly free for the time 
being; we're doing these database partly because we think people will use 
them, but also just to develop the team and skills to be able quickly to 
convert big databases to XML and its associated benefits.

Nick