Are any organizations monitizing on their own searches? Customizing / branding a browser is easy. All the popular browsers provide kits to make it simple. Is anyone using these to generate income? Can you do it with a standard AdSense for Search account?
Its no secret that Google pays Mozilla, Opera and other browser developers for seaches that come from the little search box in your browser. The developers make millions just from that little piece of real estate.
– Its been said Mozilla earsn close to a hundred million per year with this method.
– Opera was abel to stop charging for their browser, because they earned more on search.
– Google just signed a deal with Dell to buy the search box on those PCs.
Obviously an individual won’t earn that much doing this, but groups of users or mid to large sized organizations might.
For example:
– School districts, libraries, etc might be able to subsidize their IT budget with the searches of their students, patrons, teachers, etc.
– AfinitySearch: People install “afinity” browsers to support their favorite causes. (think afinity credit cards like LinuxFund. I guess you could call it “AfinitySearch”).
– Do any Linux distros modfiy their Firefox or Konquerer packages to include their own AdSense search box? or do they let that income income flow to the browsers developers?
– Companies could monitize their employee search and add additional income sources. Obviously it won’t move the bottom line that much, but it could be decent source of income. Especially in mid to large enterprises that already deploy internet custom browsers.
Take IBM for example. I’m sure they already have a custom firefox or IE browser they deploy enterprize wide. If they modified that little search box, they could be montizing the search habbits of over 300,000 employees.
There are plenty of otherways you could monitize on your organization or your users searches. I can’t be the first one to think of this. Is anyone doing it yet?
– Does the AdSens TOS agreement allow for this?
– Would google pay to be a large organization’s default search engine? Or does it only make “sense” for them to do so with the broadest customer base (PC mfgs, browser developers, popular websites)
Anyways, just some food for thought. I hope someone comments.