diciembre 03, 2004

An idea...

I suppose it would be pretty easy to start a company that did exactly what I described in my bleg yesterday.

As far as I have found, there are no companies that do what I asked about yesterday. Geocities offers free sites, but if you want to host a domain, then you have to pay. Other companies offer free hosting...but there's a catch: you have to pay a high price to register your domain with them.

I don't think it's really in my area of interest, but I think it's a profitable idea. Go buy a cheap server somewhere, write a contract up for your users, sign up for Google adsense, and then place an Adsense bar on each webpage.

Your marginal costs are extremely low -- electricity for the server? -- and thus should be easily covered by Adsense.

It may be a little difficult to find consumers. Free webpages are easy to find, and it's not expensive to host a domain name. Plus, most people who get a domain name are willing to pay the hosting fees.

Hmm. Except bloggers. Bloggers might be an easy way to find folks to sign up for free domain hosting.

noviembre 30, 2004

MSN search

I've been using the beta version of Microsoft's new MSN search.

Frankly, I'm impressed. And not just because my own sites do well in the rankings.

I've only been using it fulltime for a few days, but so far it is outdoing google. There are some searches where Google returns better results, and others where MSN returns better results. Considering that MSN Search is still in beta, this is pretty impressive.

If MSN Search returns better results, Google will have to tweak its algorithm. Quite a few of us think Google has gotten lazy about maintaining vigilance of its results' relevance.