Search Engines Are Free?... Duh.
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WHAT IS A SEARCH ENGINE?
A digital service provided by a company to allow users to search the internet for information. This is a document retrieval system contrived to help find information stored on a server, such as on the World Wide Web, inside a corporate or proprietary network, or in a personal computer. This includes documents, images, music, and even video.
FREE TECHNOLOGY?
“Industries that become digital become free.”[1] This is true based on Chris Anderson’s argument in which over time the products in the digital technology realm become cheaper. This inverse correlation evolves overtime due to Moore’s Law – the exponential growth of computer hardware technology. As computer hardware capacity increases exponentially the unit of processing power halves in price every 8 months, therefore the price of bandwidth and storage is declining rapidly. For example, the more DVDs produced, the lower the cost will be due to the abundance and ubiquity of this product. As Chris Anderson explained in his article, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, technology gets to the point to where reproduction costs are so low that they become cheaper and eventually free.
Ads are one way that pays the way for consumers to receive free service. This could be he case for any site (news-oriented, sports, auctions, search engines etc.). “Hits” is the term used for the amount of traffic a site is obtaining. The measurement of “hits” helps the search engine companies by informing the company of how successful (or unsuccessful) the site is as well as attracting potential sponsors. These sponsors then compete for “clicks” in which they can place their company links along the banner or even above the search engine results.
SEARCH ENGINES
Because the price of fiber optics, servers, and hardware in general are decreasing rapidly, these companies are able to provide cheap and free service to consumers at a very low cost to them. Offers that reveal the word “FREE” typically entice consumers to indulge themselves with that product. This is why search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing etc,.) have become ever increasingly popular. No one should have to pay to search the internet these days that is why these services are free. The strategy is to lure consumers to the site and prove to other companies that your site is worthy of sponsorship. Obviously, the more services the search engine company includes (advanced search, quotation searches, etc.) the more apt the company will attract new and existing consumers.
Initially striving to be the best search engine, Google is now competing against various companies in several different services – Map services (Mapquest), Email (Yahoo, Hotmail), Shopping (Amazon), Images (Flickr), and Video (Hulu) and other various services. Furthermore, to expand on the search engine field, Google has made agreements with YouTube and Wikipedia to help deliver their services on Google’s prominent site. By offering an abundance of services, the propensity to monopolize is imminent. Google has reached the point to where they are in the process of creating an operating system, Google Chrome, to compete even more so with the big kahuna – Microsoft.