Google Buys Australian Search Engine

Google has won the bidding war for a new type of search engine created by University of New South Wales PhD Student Ori Allon. The new search engine has been noted as speeding up the search engine process by displaying information from related searches so users do not have to actually go to a website to find out more information.

Dr Eric Martin from the university’s computer science department had this to say about the new engine.

“We have been developing a new search engine that returns not only links to webpages, but actual information so that users, when they enter keywords, get a list of related concepts, information that they can directly access. So instead of having to click on the link, read the webpage and find out the information they're after, they're provided with the information itself.”

This type of engine will present an interesting challenge for Google as most of their revenue comes from their text based advertising product Adwords. If users do not have to click on a website to visit the page, this effectively cuts off any opportunity for contextual advertisement publishers using the Adsense platform to generate visitors to their site.

How will this type of search results page impact on these types of advertisements being seen?