Isn't this just the McDonald's v Subway/Burger King example? McDonald's has the research and foot traffic. Rather than do your own, watch where the successful McDonald's go and then put your restaurant across the street.
If you have a bunch of users searching for "XYZ" on a different search engine and consistently going to link A -- wouldn't that imply it was relevant? You'd do the exact same thing for searches on your own search engine. The only difference is people have opted in to allowing you to have this info _implicitly_ by going to your search engine vs giving you this permission _explicitly_ by clicking through the EULA for the toolbar.
Indeed. Drucker somewhere makes the point that a business's key activities are innovation and marketing -- which implies you don't necessarily have to be innovative in your marketing, just good at it. Hmmm... I was just thinking that rather than do my own exhaustive search for startup companies to invest in, I'll just check who has gotten support from Y Combinator and offer them a deal, piggybacking off of Paul Graham's work. Wait, it's been done? Oh, never mind.
As a practical matter, I doubt customers will care so long as they've always had the option of turning off that part of IE's behavior. I mean, when did you last care about the authenticity of your phone directory's information?
If you have a bunch of users searching for "XYZ" on a different search engine and consistently going to link A -- wouldn't that imply it was relevant? You'd do the exact same thing for searches on your own search engine. The only difference is people have opted in to allowing you to have this info _implicitly_ by going to your search engine vs giving you this permission _explicitly_ by clicking through the EULA for the toolbar.