Search drives the online commerce world by bringing sellers and buyers together.  As a seller, you most important task is getting your site to rank high organically and to have your advertisements placed most prominently and most frequently to user interested in buying and only to users interested in your product.  A buyer chooses a search engine on the basis of more reliably getting them to what they are looking for.  And, with commercial queries, getting them to the “best” seller where best is a fairly complex and hard to define term in this context.  Happy buyers keep using the search engine and paying the sellers.  Sellers who manage their organic and paid placements correctly sell lots of product.  Successful search engines make considerable profit.  That’s just the way the ecosystem has evolved – it’s the broadly used search engine that has all the influence and so they end up with considerable profit.

What if the rules changed?  What if some of the search engine profit was returned to users?  Could this change the ecosystem and could it be a good thing?  Let’s watch because Microsoft is about to announce a “cash back service” later today according to Search Engine Land.  In this posting, Playing with Live Cashback, the blog author demonstrates using the Live Cashback system and concludes that it won’t have much impact.  I’m less certain.  I suspect that respecting users and returning some value to them will change this market in positive way. It’ll be fun to watch over the next 4 to 6 weeks and see how the search ecosystem evolves.

                                                --jrh

James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
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