The nearest mankind has got to an oracle these days are the search engines. They know everything, they answer everything, and if they don’t, it is because the question was not properly formed. Thanks to this unheard of capability, a lot of people use search engines as their start point (pt-pt); therefore, the bulk of internet traffic comes from them. The greatest generator of traffic to blogs, are for instance, search engines.

There is a whole economy that was created around content search engines, and a lot of second-generation Brazilian web startups are dependent on them to create revenue streams. A classic example occurs when content index services from other websites create optimized pages for searches; place ads around the content; and wait for traffic to come from search engines, when the so called “keyword droppers” are going to click unwittingly at ads, generating revenues.

The problem with this business model is that if the search engines change any parameter in its relevance algorithm, the traffic to the service can be severely affected, and the startup can agonize to death. As any beginner knows, it is dangerous to build a business that relies on a company that is not yours.

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