Adam Penenberg writes in Wired that there is a very real financial incentive for the NYT web site to continue to hide its stories behind a subscription wall. A $20 million/year all-you-can-eat royalty agreement with Lexis-Nexis is an awfully hard arrangement to tear up. John Battelle noodles on this idea a bit more and ponders when the attraction of differentiated revenue from individuals, finding stories on their own via Google and other search engines, will outweigh the guaranteed revenue stream from L-N. He also adds:

What revenue stream accounts for the lion’s share of search’s margin? Advertising. That’s a one legged stool ready to tip over. As the search giants become more and more media companies, they must develop subscription services, and because users won’t want to pay for something they already believe is free (searching) search engines will have to figure out a way to become middlemen to paid content. After all, they own distribution, so they should become…distributors. Were they to execute this service in a scaled and elegant fashion, it might be viewed as a benefit – in many cases, subscribers will get more content for less than they were paying in the past (that’s the benefit of volume).

Searching for the New York Times – Wired

Google as a portal to premium content? Haven’t we been there before? One comment to John’s post points out that this has been AOL’s model for the past 10 years. Yahoo has continually tried to push premium services and could easily bundle in targeted content. Northern Light also blazed this trail but flamed out after a failure to bring together enough content.

There are many ways to get to content and Google is the current flavor of the month. Of greater demand is having a single account that aggregates access fees to each site for a reasonable monthly fee. Why pay nytimes.com and wsj.com separately when you’d rather pay a single bill for unfettered access to these sites and more? Yes, Google has the distribution network but PayPal or American Express might be a better player for a unified subscription account. After setting up unified subscription fees, the next step is working with each of the major content vendors on feeding RSS feeds of their content to the major search engine vendors so that their content begins to move up in the rankings. Portions of the proceeds of the subscription fees could then go to each of the search engine vendors, paid out as a proportion of the amount of traffic they drive to the payment vendor for signup. $40/month sounds about right – we’ll call it a “global media press pass.”

UPDATE: Cory cuts to the chase

The NYT’s registration system and expiring pages have doomed them to google-obscurity. Wired News argues that they’ve gone from being the paper of record to a Web-era irrelevancy, and all to protect a Lexis-Nexis agreement and to bring in two to three percent of the digital division’s profits.

Unlinkable NYT doomed to google-obscurity – boingboing

One node in the discussion of the internet as a new platform is the meme of Google specifically as this platform. The notion gained legs with announcements of Orkut, the social software site affiliated with Google and later touched a nerve with the announcement of Gmail, Google’s online email service. This discussion was kicked off in April 2004 by Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix.net in a well cited post, The Secret Source of Google’s Power in a post whose comments section is now outgrown the original post
. . . expanded by Jason Kottke in his post, GooOS, the Google Operating System
. . . referenced by Jon Udell in his Strategic Developer column,
. . . and summed up by Tim O’Reilly

Gmail is fascinating to me as a watershed event in the evolution of the internet. In a brilliant Copernican stroke, gmail turns everything on its head, rejecting the personal computer as the center of the computing universe, instead recognizing that applications revolve around the network as the planets revolve around the Sun. But Google and gmail go even further, showing that once internet apps truly get to scale, they’ll make the network itself disappear into the universal virtual computer, the internet as operating system.

Jon Udell later extends his musings in a later column,

The gigabyte slice of the Google file system available to Gmail beta testers will, in many cases, surpass the testers’ own corporate disk quotas for email.

Put that way, one can begin to see a world where the Google index is the broader file systems that points to “things out there” where our email, web pages, and social networks are all inputs into that file system. Jon goes on to explain this world where Google owned the operating system and what such a unified file system that continually indexes everything on your local PC could do:

Bayesian categorization: My SpamBayes-enhanced e-mail program learns continuously about what I do and don’t find interesting, and helps me organize messages accordingly. A systemwide agent that’s always building categorized views of all your content would be a great way to burn idle CPU cycles.

Context reassembly: When writing a report, you’re likely to refer to a spreadsheet, visit some Web pages, and engage in an IM chat. Using its indexed and searchable event stream, the system would restore this context when you later read or edited the document. Think browser history on steroids.

Screen pops: When you receive an e-mail, IM, or phone call, the history of your interaction with that person would pop up on your screen. The message itself could be used to automatically refine the query.

I guess I’m ok with this, so long as it’s not trying to sell me ads based on its findings!

First launched in 2002, the Google Search Appliance is a rack-mounted unit designed to crawl and index intranet pages for enterprise search. Combined with OS-level integration points such as the Google Deskbar, the appliance is the bridge between an index of your PC hard drive and the internet. While Google has not yet announced an integration into the PC level index space, several third party vendors have announced the ability to add adaptive crawl technologies integrated with Microsoft Windows and Office. Most notable is Lookout which even looks like a Google knock-off.

The GB-1001 is a rack-mounted two-unit (2U) appliance that can be licensed to search up to 1.5 million documents at a rate of 300 queries per minute.

Our entry level license indexes up to 150,000 documents and costs $32,000 for a two-year license with hardware, software and technical support all included. Pricing scales upwards based on the number of documents.

A list of published customers.