By Mark Ward
Technology Correspondent, BBC News website

You may not know it, but every time you search on Google, the company makes 12 cents in revenue.

That may not sound like much but it all adds up when you realise that Americans alone did more than 2.7 billion searches via Google in January 2006, according to figures gathered by Nielsen/NetRatings.

The analyst firm estimates that 48% of the 5.7 billion searches carried out by Americans in January were done via Google.

It also said that 39% more searches were done in January 2006 than in the same month in 2005. But, said the firm, this was not because search engines were doing a bad job.

"Web users are conducting more searches not because they can't find what they're looking for," said Ken Cassar of Nielsen/NetRatings, "but because search as a utility has become deeply ingrained into people's everyday lives."

The unwritten implication here is that Google too has assumed huge importance in the lives of many web users. For some Google is all they know of the internet because via its various projects that they do their searching, shopping, e-mailing, blogging, picture storing and chatting.

But Google is not just important to lots of web users, it matters to rivals of the search giant too.

Starting point

"There's a standard way of using search engines that Google has introduced to the market," said Adrian Cox, head of Ask, formerly Ask Jeeves, in the UK.

But, he said, what has become clear is that search is now just the starting point for that relationship people have with the web.

Old media moguls like Rupert Murdoch are snapping up new media firms

No longer do the different search sites compete on how many results they can provide to people not least because, as even Google admits, most people get what they want in the first five results returned to them.

Which is why all the search sites, Google, MSN, AOL and Yahoo are branching out and trying to tempt users to live their online lives via their particular portfolio of services.

Most of these companies make their most significant amounts of money from advertising and that only comes from having a large, well-defined community.

Advertisers are far more likely to pay to reach Canon digital camera using kitten lovers in the Bay area than they are to pay to air adverts to women who happen to be watching Desperate Housewives on TV.

This need for large well-defined audiences also explains why Google, Yahoo, MSN, Yahoo and others are snapping up web firms such as Flickr, Bloglines and Del.icio.us, which come complete with a ready made community.

It is why Rupert Murdoch's News Corp snapped up MySpace as it was a great way to get a foothold in this market.

It also explains why many start-ups are being bought moments after they launch because all the big players are afraid of missing out on the next big thing. For that reason, as well as many others, Google bought the online word processing site Writely.

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