4 ms·
But the search isn't profitable without the ads. What is the competitor's motivation to build a search engine?
by blindmute 5y ago
But the search isn't profitable without the ads. What is the competitor's motivation to build a search engine?
- hedora 5y ago1) They can run display ads (linked to search terms, not users) on the results page, and nowhere else. This eliminates the conflict of interest where spammy results kick off ad auctions that the search engine profits from. At this point, revenue would be proportional to: market-share * expected-number-of-searches-before-success So, the dominant player (with market share near 100%) would be incentivized to make the first search or so produce crappy results. 2) This incentive can be eliminated by throttling the rate at which ads are delivered to a given user (such as by repeating the same ads for free on search refinements, or simply skipping ads on search refinements). DDG is still in step 1, where the upside on market share is much greater than the upside from spamming low quality results to increase incremental ad display rates.