> You fall short here too, they exist so that you don't spend countless 
> hours searching for some product on your own, they have made bullet speed 
> search engines and offer lots of resources to find the service you need, 
> no matter how odd it may seem.

The search engines have exactly one purpose, which is to collect the search 
words from you and me and turn them into keywords (adwords) that are in turn 
sold to their clients (who bid on the words). The search engines and the 
other Google and Yahoo products are actually datamining tools, even if they 
don't carry ads themselves. This is why they are so efficient.
In 2006, 99% of Google's revenue (10.6 billion dollars) came from 
advertising 
(http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312507044494/d10k.htm).

It doesn't meant that Google and Yahoo don't provide good services, but we 
shouldn't be blind to the reason why they provide these services. "Don't be 
evil" is nothing much than a marketing slogan. And if they were to 
disappear, the void would be filled instantly by other ad networks.

(by the way, I was always intrigued by the fact that a lot of Google 
services are in perpetual beta. A regular IT company would suffer from this 
(see what delaying Vista costed Microsoft), but Google, as an advertising 
company, obviously uses the betas as testbeds for datamining ideas, and 
drops them if they fail to generate ad revenue, direct or indirect).

G.


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