How Search Engines make a profit

"Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is 'the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via 'natural' or unpaid ('organic' or 'algorithmic') search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM), which deals with paid inclusion. "-wikipedia. After half a year of using Bing, Search Engine Optimization seems to stand out more to me than Search Engine Marketing. The reason for this is that Bing's popularity mainly comes by giving the most relevent search results (a form of product differentiation). And like SEO, Bing "target[s] different kinds of search, including imagesearch, local searc, video search..."-Wikispedia. However, just because Bing shows a non-proft characteristic, doesn't mean that Microsoft doesn't find other ways to make money...this leads to the topic of... HOW SEARCH ENGINES MAKE PROFIT

The following link elaborates on how Search Engines make Money in General. These 'ways' can be categorized or defined as the product because it is what the Bing employees can sell.

http://econbylorraine.wikispaces.com/How+a+Search+Engine+makes+profit+1

Graph

Demand curve

• has become more elastic and shifted to the left when Bing entered this industry. Website maximizers (such as customers who pay for better placement) can now substitute into another search engine- Bing being less popular than others such as Google, will probably charge a smaller price to gain customers
• The demand will later shift to the right for Bing, if and when Microsoft's search engine becomes more popular. This will happen because if more people use this engine, bing's list products will be of better quality and thus desired more by customers. An example is data collection-if a greater population type searches on bing, perfect information of a greater population can be attained. This definitely entices customers and their companies because it can benefit them a great deal...and bing, knowing that perfect information is vital to companies, would maximize by charging a higher price for their better quality data.