search engine domination

[Allfetish]

Originally Posted by eman

Google (Live, Yahoo and others) could very easily forge direct relationships with porn producers/distributors and totally eliminate the linklist/tgp/directory model (they may already be preparing to do so).

The advantages to the producing businesses are obvious. Most obviously, Google (or whoever) could guarantee a precisely measured flow of highly convertible traffic to the producer's sites. Measure this against the effectiveness of the hit-or-miss affiliate model.

I suspect that Google (and the other big SEs), merely tolerate the presence of Link-o-rama, DD, Tommy or whoever. When the time is ripe they will drop all porn-promoting sites at a stroke. After a week or two nobody will notice that they've gone.

Discuss.

PS - since linklists/tgps/direcories have a purely commercial objective there's no logical reason for a commercial search engine (Google etc) to give them any credence - let alone prominence.

One thing is that Yahoo and Google are for the most part fearful of getting involved in adult. Look at googles adsense. Look at what Yahoo does to its Yahoo adult groups. Can you even imagine how much Yahoo could have made from its adult groups in the early part of this decade?!?

Another problem is that once they get in bed with the content producers the surfers will begin to notice this and see it as a shill. People will say "Don't use Google for adult stuff. It is all ads!" now whether this is any better than "It is all Spam!" to them, I am not so sure. But google does not wish to be seen as paid search engine like goto.com was. Sure it has sponsored results, but these are seperate from the normal rankings.