The Gong Show

As promised in my post on a business that leverages interestingness in search engines, here’s another page from my raw brainstorm of business ideas: I’ll start with an explanation of the mental place I was in when I was forming the idea. About six months ago, I was surprised to learn just how high the bidding can get on adsense/adwords click-thru prices. There are adsense arbitrage sites which determine what the highest paying keywords are at a given time. Google pays out north of $80 dollars for the highest paying keyword to their ad network members right now. I don’t remember Google’s cut exactly, but I believe adsense pays out 80% of the auction price to the ad network member hosting the ads, so that means that the most expensive keywords cost $100 dollars per click. If you want to spent some Texas law firm’s money, search Google for “Austin dwi” and click on a few of the ads. It feels wasteful in a twistedly satisfying way.

Anyway, learning about the crushing amount of money search engines are making on my eyeballs made me itch for a cut of the deal. The search results for “Austin dwi” are not worth the potential hundreds of dollars that Google makes off my clicks, and I’m sure that some open competition would improve the value proposition that the search engines offer to end users. I understand that the highest paying keywords subsidize the high quality results I get for completely ridiculous, esoteric terms, such as “brrreeeport.” However, I still think there’s enough money in this market that I should see a cut of the absurd bidding for my eyeballs.

Therefore, I propose a site (or firefox plug-in) that takes my searches and returns to me the search results from the highest bidding search engine. In other words, I think someone should create an open market for routing my search requests. The major players can bid on the ability to show me results for the keywords I entered, and I get the results from the highest bidder without delay or interruption. If no one wants to bid on some esoteric keywords that I choose, then I would simply see some predetermined, user-defined default results. I get paid some very high percentage of the bid, and the third-party open market provider (in other words, the business I am proposing) takes a small cut. Obviously, I’d have to sign up for an account with a tax payer ID, etc, but that would just be a one-time hassle.
I think the idea is pretty straight forward; but the difficulty with this idea is in handling potential abuse. Here are some abuses I can think of and potential ways to handle them, but this is where I hope discussing will evolve (thinking of others abuses I missed, or other ways to handle abuses):

• Problem: Participants in the auction that have advertisers which pay based on impression. If an auction participant can get enough advertisers to pay based on ad impressions and not ad click-thrus, then there’s no incentive for the auction participant to return any search results at all to me. The participant to bid for my keywords, and, if they win, just serve me garbage ads that pay out based on impressions.
• Solution: Have a white-list of auction participants. By default, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and any other reputable search engine would be able to compete for your results. You would have to explicitly OK lesser-known search engines
• Other solution: Ban impression payments. Require that all auction participants work on PPC business models, not PPImpression.
• Problem: How do you prevent abuses by fake users? People or bots just searching all day to make some money would significantly lower the value that advertisers would see, which lowers the price that advertisers are willing to pay, and thus lower the auction price for a user’s keywords. How do you ensure that searches are genuine.
• Solution: Well, this problem already exists with click fraud on Google… and Google has built a toolset combining behavior algorithms and human auditing on some statistically significant portion of the ads clicked, so similar tactics can be used to battle the similar problem.
• Other solution: user statistics be passed along with the keywords requested to the auction by the third-party open auction site. In other words, if I make 80,000 searches a day for the term asbestos, that information is made public in my search request auctions. Then the auction participants can price their bids accordingly. Acting in their own self interest, they probably won’t bid on an auction for a user which such a sordid history. However, if the auction for the same keywords comes from a user that has a very normal looking search history, that auction will result in a much higher price.
• Problem: Real-time bidding. Is it too much to expect that all search engines will be able to participate in the bidding process without any significant delay?
• Solution: I pitched myself a watermelon with this “problem” because the answer is obvious. Google, Overture, and MSN have already figured out how to do auctions for your keywords to advertisers. Simply switch search engines for advertisers and this problem is solved.
• Problem: How do you ensure that results are of high enough quality to compete with Google (or the search engine of your choice). Bad results will frustrate users and no one will want to use this open market for search results.
• Solution: Well, the “whitelist” solution would work here, assuming that search engines would deliver the same results for a set of keywords via auction as they would deliver via direct search. In fact, this problem is very similar to the first problem I listed… I must be getting stretched thinking of problems.
• Problem: Security and Privacy! My tax payer ID is now associated with a history of my searches and auction results in some database just waiting to be released by some dumb corporation.
• Solution: One would hope there would be some excellent layer of abstraction and encryption between a user’s personal account information and a user’s search history, but this requires end users to trust corporations blindly. Furthermore, no implementation abstracting these two data sets will ever be perfect or foolproof. I don’t think there’s a good solution here. This is the price you pay to get paid. I’d love to hear more ideas on this point, but I think is privacy is more important than money, then you should use a search engine that will not tie

Known-Existing-Implementation/Competition: A9 is paying users through Amazon discounts. This tells me that paying users to be their search engine is not an absurd concept, but the really interesting part of this idea lies in the open auction to deliver your results at the highest price, and I don’t know of any service that is currently doing this.

So, what do you all think? Would you personally use such a service? Is there an opportunity here, or am I missing something?