This. When you do build a competitive search engine and you see how much money Microsoft has put behind theirs to essentially no avail (how many times have angry shareholders tried to get them to kill it off?) you start to realize a key fact.
If you want search engine competition you have to take Google's Ad business away.
Its weird I know but Google's search ads pay $80 - $100 RPMs and other guys ads pay $30 RPMs. If Microsoft could use Google's ad network they would be a solid contributor to the bottom line of Microsoft (which is why they can't of course).
If you could magically peel that Ad network/agency into its own entity and require it to give non-discriminatory terms to everyone, I believe we would have a pretty vibrant search space. My reasoning there is that the money associated with search advertising would fall into buckets that were much more closely aligned with market share, as opposed to today where someone like Microsoft can have a large share of the search 'eyeballs' but only a fraction of the revenue because their Ads don't have the RPM numbers.
Both Yahoo & Microsoft did a really bad job for a really long time at simply providing a platform that is comfortable for advertisers to use.
I have run ad campaigns on Adwords continuously for 7+ years. Throughout that time I have run ad campaigns on Yahoo, now Microsoft Adcenter, on and off. The last I checked their ad platform was about where Adwords was in 2005.
Yahoo had some very reprehensible things on their platform. I had to shut off all of my campaigns because someone at their company was changing what my ads said without my permission. Besides being a legal issue for Yahoo at the time, it put me in a position of unlimited liability. Fortunately, I never witnessed that behavior after Microsoft took over. Yet, Microsoft's platform was just too difficult to get working.
That was probably $5 million + in missed advertising revenue from me, just a tiny advertiser. I can only imagine the billions of dollars of revenue Microsoft and Yahoo lost for failing to take seriously the search advertising marketplace.
It is not clear that agency is the issue here. The search ad business is a long-tail business. People who read and comment on HN, who understand how search works, likely are heavy users of search yet contribute little revenue. But hackers are important to Google in other ways because they are the tech trend setters who turned Google into a verb and told their computer-illiterate brethren to just "Google" it. Now just imagine what some of those less literate, who believe in palm reading or tarot cards, would think when faced with a computer that appears to half read one's mind. I mean these are the real gold mines that the ads people are looking for. And once they get comfortable they are not just going to switch based on some technical merits they've never even heard of and the ad market will continue to pay more to those who can deliver more of the "gold mine" type users.
If you want search engine competition you have to take Google's Ad business away.
Its weird I know but Google's search ads pay $80 - $100 RPMs and other guys ads pay $30 RPMs. If Microsoft could use Google's ad network they would be a solid contributor to the bottom line of Microsoft (which is why they can't of course).
If you could magically peel that Ad network/agency into its own entity and require it to give non-discriminatory terms to everyone, I believe we would have a pretty vibrant search space. My reasoning there is that the money associated with search advertising would fall into buckets that were much more closely aligned with market share, as opposed to today where someone like Microsoft can have a large share of the search 'eyeballs' but only a fraction of the revenue because their Ads don't have the RPM numbers.