Don Dodge, who works for the Microsoft Emerging Business Team, has put a few numbers on the value of search. Working from Google's published financial results and market cap, he reckons that "each 1% of search market share is worth over $100M in revenues" and "the stock market values 1% market share at over $1 billion".
A single search in the US is worth about 12 cents, on average.
In a comment to Don's post, usability guru Jakob Nielsen, points out:
The value per page view on a content site tends to be about 0.1 cents. Thus, pointing people to content is more than 100 times as profitable as actually writing that content. (This is why I called search engines leeches on the Web, at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search_engines.html )
In other words, content providers (including The Guardian) get 1c for creating content but Google gets 99c for indexing it. And, of course, if you don't let Google index it, you probably don't get the 1c ;-)
