Pegging the viability of a searchable index to ad revenue is a deeply perplexing move. The technology to run and maintain a web index is not new. Paid indexes

Pegging the viability of a searchable index to ad revenue is a deeply perplexing move. The technology to run and maintain a web index is not new. Paid indexes have existed in specialized domains (academia, law, news) for decades. Wikipedia is a vast, self-indexed resource supported by donations. It's also indexed by Google, and it's availability over the public internet makes them (Google) an enormous amount of money. The labor of creating Wikipedia (the actual labor of organizing human knowledge) was done for free, and the maintenance of Wikipedia is funded by donation. Every paid ISP prior to Google maintained its own index, which was paid for by user fees. Expert communities (which often can't depend on commercial indexes) maintain encyclopedic curated sets of links. The internet - a vast decentralized web of self-published information - is what people want. It drives people to the internet in droves. One strategy for capitalizing on that hunger is to index everything, offer a pretty good index for "free," then sell access to those eyeballs. It is far from the only way to make the internet more accessible. The only thing I use google for right now is a glorified phone book, because I'm too stupid to remember urls and too lazy/forgetful to bookmark them. So sometimes (sadly), I'll google the twoplustwo forums for poker, or "hacker news" because I forgot news.ycombinator.com. But it's the expert communities that I want, not Google's inscrutible index. No one has really succeeded in substituting attentional transactions with actual micro-payments, but it's certainly not impossible. There's obviously a demand.