Armchair Theorist

Mark Cuban proposed a thought experiment recently.

The proposition in a nutshell: Can you shift the balance of power in the search world by buying out the top sites in Google’s search index for $1000 (or more) each for them to voluntarily withdraw themselves from Google’s index? Could this competitive market for search engine exclusivity knock Google from its pole position? Because the thinking goes, as Cuban puts it, “every search engine has some number of core sites, that when removed from its index , destabilizes the value of its search.”

The general consensus (after reading through 94 comments) seems to be that this is a silly and naive idea and would never work. Most of the commentators like Andrew Parker put forward economic arguments to show the futility of such an exercise because the math simply doesn’t add up.

However, instead of overly focusing on the numbers, here is a blatantly obvious reason to me why this gambit will never work:

If anything, by paying off the top sites to voluntarily withdraw from Google’s search index, Google search may actually become more useful.

Cuban proposes buying out sites in the top 5 results of the top 25k most common search terms. Give or take a small percentage of exceptions, these sites are essentially your Wikipedias, ESPNs, and Amazons of the world.

Now, if you remove them from Google’s index, I believe it will actually rejuvenate Google’s search results by providing users alternative destinations where they can get relevant (and likely more focused) information from. If the users are not satisfied with what they see, they can always fall back to checking Wikipedia, ESPN, and Amazon to find what they need. If I google for “social software” or “LeBron James stats” and don’t see the information I’m looking for, I know I can always go to Wikipedia and ESPN to get what I need.

The thing is that these top sites have a brand and presence that is so strong that just because they disappear from Google’s search results and appear on Yahoo’s search results doesn’t mean that they will receive any less user traffic.

So the consumer wins because they can still get the information they need by using their favorite search engine and perhaps even discover new sources of information.

All the top sites win because not only do they get to pocket hard cold cash, they won’t suffer a decline in traffic for their efforts.

Google wins because users will continue to use it as their preferred search engine.

The only loser will be whichever search engine that forks over the $1 billion or so to the top sites and not changing the search engine balance of power one bit.

And we haven’t even considered about all the ethical and legal aspects of colluding with the top sites against Google.

As a thought experiment, this was fun. As a plan, it’s pretty much doomed to fail. There may be other ways to beat Google (perhaps social search or vertical search?), but this surely ain’t one of them.

Could this be one of Mark’s secret plans after he takes over Yahoo with Icahn?

See Also:

• No Firefox of Search? I’ll Settle for the iPod of Search Instead
• 5 Observations on Google Chrome
• FriendFeed Proves its Worth as a Research Tool during South Ossetia Crisis