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Gary points to an article by Ben Elgin of Business Week. He takes a look at the recent desktop search offerings and closes with some ideas about how the search engines can make some money from desktop searches.

"The money-making potential of desktop search is dubious in the short term. The various players haven't announced business blueprints, but it's likely that some will experiment with ways to cash in, such as placing relevant ads alongside search results.

Such a move, however, would be rife with controversy. Google sparked a firestorm last year when it announced that its free e-mail service, Gmail, would scan customers' messages and place relevant ads next to the text. An effort to scan the content of personal files would likely prompt an even testier reaction."

Dubious indeed, but including sponsored ads in your desktop results is something I believe will be the only way to go, should the search engines want to make money from desktop search. That being said, they may be happy just to have desktop search as a value proposition.

Thanks Gary.

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world's most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.