Beating Google?

An interesting idea, but the natural result would be for the web being segmented into multiple parts, as no one company will buy off all of the top sites. No one search engine would be clearly better, since each would give you its exclusive piece of the web. At this point, you would almost assuredly see third party sites or tools which would simply scrape and aggregate search results from all of the major engines. You used to see this back in the '90s before Google managed to out-index everyone else. These aggregation sites would. So not only would this idea be very bad for users, it probably wouldn't be sustainable.

There's a scary side to this - what if Google themselves gave you better rankings or lots of free adwords if you agreed to only be indexed by them (selectively block the other crawlers)?

Of course they have no reason to now, and maybe not ever, and even if they did maybe there would be anti trust issues. But it's still a scary amount of lock in - probably even more powerful than Wintel.

$1000? Are you kidding me? Some companies spend that much on AdWords in one DAY.

And not to mention the lawsuits. $16 billion dollars of revenue can pay for a LOT of lawyers.

Being one of the top 5 results for a common search term is worth a hell of a lot more than $1000.

There's no way you could simply pay off the top sites to leave Google.

Interesting albeit evil idea.

The top natural results are worth a ton, and as the incumbent, Google could probably bid higher for them.

But more problematic for the strategy: if the top 5-10 results disappeared, wouldn't some enterprising we-try-harder also-ran in the same categories just rush up to fill the void with equally-good results? Most top results are probably not so proprietary they can't be rebuilt by others -- just look how many top results are from Wikipedia.

Finally, if this buy-out strategy actually did start to work, it could attract legal/regulatory attention as being anticompetitive or anticonsumer. Legal grounds for indexing sites even against their wishes could be found or legislated. Plausibly legal workarounds (like having users index materials as they visit, and forward summaries to Google, a law the old Grub project) would be devised.