From their FAQ:
How can Spurl.net cover its costs?
Spurl.net’s core business is in mining information about the World Wide Web from our databases. Note that it is information about Web pages in the database, NOT about the Spurl.net users, whose privacy we respect greatly (see our Privacy policy).
During my time in the MSN Search team we worked hard on making advertising “relevant and accretive to the user experience”. In other words, if you’re thinking of displaying an ad to your customer, make sure the ad actually helps the customer accomplish something they want. This is one of the premises modern search engine businesses are built on: the ads on search result pages are useful more often than not, because they are based on the words you yourself typed in. It’s simple, it’s relevant, and it works.
Many online businesses are heading in the same direction—relevant ads, often text-based rather than graphical—and backing away from the untargeted ads typical of old-school Web portals and conventional media such as TV, radio, and print. Sadly, most brick-and-mortar world companies I’m familiar with simply haven’t grasped the “useful advertising” concept, or don’t care to. Case in point: Esso (Exxon Mobil) recently installed TV screens in their gas stations around Toronto.
Google made a smart move in acquiring Urchin, the web analytics company, earlier this year. They made a smarter move by opening up the analytics services for free a few days ago.
Why make a $200 analytics product free to all? (1) Build goodwill and stickiness with web site owners; (2) Create an upsell path to AdWords, Google’s main revenue engine; (3) Derive strategic insight by mining the data. No-brainer.
In a recent post I listed several social issues related to the so-called attention economy. One of these is deciding how to manage the digital record — the “breadcrumb trail” — of your attention while online. For example, Amazon knows what you purchased through them, NetFlix knows what movies you’ve rented, and all the big search engines have a complete log of every query ever issued from every IP address, together with the search results clicked on. (Yikes.) As Jon Udell writes, at least some people believe this status quo is unacceptable.
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