Reveal the secrets of the search engine business model attention wholesalers and search alliances

In the previous article, we talked about the secrets of search engine background work, as well as Spider programs and hyperchain analysis. Search engines ultimately provide users with a convenient way to obtain information: enter a keyword in the search box to immediately obtain the most relevant query results in public information on the Internet. With this "simple and reliable" feature, a good search engine immediately attracts a large number of Internet users.
However, the other side that everyone is more interested in is how the massive number of users in the search engine is converted into a company's profit? Here, search engines not only play the role of "media integration", but also play the role of a new internet user attention wholesaler.
"Media Integration" role
Search engines first assume a "media integration" role-serving media. Search engines are the same as traditional media and emerging online media, that is, their profit equation is: Content-circulation-advertising-profit. However, due to the characteristics of the search engine, the specific operation of the business model of media integration in the search engine is quite different from that of other media, and shows many of its own features.
In terms of content, traditional media (including emerging online media) requires a large number of reporters and editors to create the content of the media with "uniqueness" and "depth" to attract readers. The search engine does not have a reporter and does not produce news by itself. The search engine has the "Spider program" mentioned in the previous article ", it collects the public information pages of the Internet world from time to time, while the "edit" of the search engine is a variety of indexing programs and sorting rules, which are queried based on the keywords proposed by users, these programs edit relevant information into useful result pages for readers.
According to a data statistics, Baidu, the world's largest Chinese search engine, receives hundreds of millions of keyword queries every day in 138 countries. This means that Baidu's server will generate hundreds of millions of query results pages, these results pages are the stage for the search engine's profit model.
A typical query result page can be divided into two parts: left and right. Generally, the left side occupies about 3/4 of the page, which is used to display the query results. The right side occupies about 1/4 of the page, which is used to display other text information related to the query keyword. Based on this layout, the search engine advertisement can be performed in both the query result display area on the left and the text information link area on the right.
Advertisements in the query result display area on the left are generally called Spot Price Ranking advertisements (Yahoo and Baidu currently adopt this advertising mode ). The search engine places the customer's ad page in the index Library, depending on the customer's bidding for the query keyword, when a common user queries this keyword, the ad links of different customers are displayed in different order on the result page. In general, ordinary users will show much higher attention to the information that ranks at the top of the search results, and the ad performance that ranks at the top of the search results is generally much better. At the same time, spot price ranking ads also adopt a special "pay-as-you-go" mode, that is, after each user clicks an ad link, it is necessary for advertisers to pay a certain amount of fees to search engines. Therefore, the so-called bidding price is actually a bidding price for each valid click, generally, the starting price for each search engine is RMB 0.3 per click.