[ApolloFortyNine]

And then have ad companies bid on spots instead of companies? That just sounds like adding a middleman (inefficency) to the system. Like making me go to a car dealer instead of just adding to cart like anything else.

The other alternative would be paying for search, in which case everyone would just leave for another search engine the next day.

Which is honestly why I have so much calling google search a monopoly. The switching cost is comically cheap and easy. You could cut out Google search within the next 5 minutes from the rest of your life.

[seanhunter]

The whole point is to introduce more players into the system so there is the possibility of competition. At present it is very efficient in the sense that you have a single company with monopolistic control over what content gets surfaced and how content gets monetised. That's a conflict of interest that's so obviously harmful to consumers Page and Brin actually call it out in the original "Anatomy of a Search Engine" paper.

    "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

    Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious."

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf (see the whole section entitled "Advertising and Mixed Motives".