We all dream about that perfect search engine. The engine that gives you answer for every question without trying your ability to think of imaginary keywords that might or might not exist. The search engine that will tell you where your kids are and what they are doing, the search engine that tells who you need to marry, the search engine that tells you if are going to become the next president.
But wait, it will never happen.
There is a conflict of interest that arises in every advertising based business. Every content provider is serving a advertiser. They owe the advertiser a share of your attention.
If search engines became perfect, you will hardly click the ad. If search engine became perfect, you will not visit a website, the content owner will not have any reason to share his content with the search engine.
Marrissa mayer, gave a seminar in web.20 summit in which she shared how increasing the number of search results on each page from 10 to 30 caused the traffic and revenue to reduce 20%.
When marrisa mayer equates people leaving their search results page early and not clicking ads to bad performance you know there is not much hope.
The chances are a user might might have more search results to view, he focuses less on ads, he finds a good result in 30 results and visits the website.
Itsclearly understandable, irrespective of what google tells you, they want you on their website. That is where they get their revenues from.
I dont blame them, they are a for profit company. Its the entire business model that has conflict of interest built in.
Someday maybe they will start an ad free search engine and charge a fee for it. There they can give users the best search engine, because you are paying them for it. Simple.
