Jason Unger

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In Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox this week, he proposes an interesting next step for Microsoft, now that their bid for Yahoo! is over (emphasis is mine).

Now that Steve Ballmer has earned his bonus for the year by walking from overpaying for Yahoo, he needs to do something else with his $50B. One idea I would like him to try is to refund some of the outrageous sums harvested by search engines.

a) Give back to the websites that create the content that search engines currently scrape for free: pay sites for only being indexed in one search engine and refuse the other engines. In particular, allow access to deep link archives of value-added content for users entering from your search engine. Value proportion to users: When you search on engine X, you find stuff that's otherwise not available.

So Microsoft, Google or Yahoo should pay me to list my information? Interesting idea, but it's way too late for that.

In a "normal" capitalistic agreement, Nielsen is right — they should be paying me. I put out my information, they use it in their product, and they make money off of selling ads near my listing.

But, given where we are in our expectations with the Internet, this will never happen. Users expect to find the best information when they do an online search — not a company-filtered answer to their query.

What good is a resource if it has no good resources? Obviously, it's no good at all.

This is a similar argument for net neutrality. If your access provider can greatly affect where you get your information, your viewpoint is going to be skewed.

I highly doubt Nielsen's suggestion will happen, and if it does, the types of sites entering into an agreement will be low-profile. Would CNN really NOT want to be indexed by Google News? Would Engadget ONLY want to be indexed by AOL (which owns it)? It would be pretty stupid.

Would you accept money from a search engine for an exclusive listing?