"James A. Donald" wrote:
-- At 02:57 PM 2/26/2001 -0800, Ray Dillinger wrote:
Finally, sites supported by micropayments are going to have to figure out something about web spiders. If "scooter" can't spend several million dollars a month on these places, they're not going to get into the altavista database, for example. So if you want the site to be in a search engine at all, you're going to have to let the search engine's robot cruise the site for free. Wanna bet it would be about twenty seconds before somebody released a "Pretend to be a web spider and browse pay sites for FREE!" utility?
Not a problem. Typically a micropayment site will have index and summary pages that are free, and these free pages will contain lots of pay links. You will not want the spider to traverse the pay links.
Or you make the pay for pages be error pages in the body with keywords of the contents. That way, say your bot hits an article about squirrel mating habbits, in the body, you hide the keywords of that article (in comments, or in a 0 point font, or in black on black text, or in the header, etc.), so that bot can add them to it's corpus and get you the results on a search, but the HTML displays a sign up page. It won't get you results on specific phrases, but the keywords will get you the results you need. Pretty easy to do with CGI's. So when someone goes to google.com and gets results on that pay-for-access page, even if they hit the "cached page" page, they'll see the pay-for-access to this article, if they want to get it, they pay their $0.005 or whatever micropayment, and it's done. This assumes that the micropayment per content view model will work. Having worked at a big 800lbs gorrilla pay-for web site in the past, I can tell you it's not likely to work. 99% of the audience will not pay for the article - they'll just go elsewhere for similar info. That 1% that is conducting commercial research will pay even as much as $500 per page if the data is complete. As an example, once a year, the said co put out a list of info about other companies. The same list was published on paper for under $5 about a month later. We had quite a few purchases for this list, some were two people from the same company purchasing the list. Of course anyone with a scanner and good OCR software would have it for $5, but it goes to show you micropayments aren't the way to go. Macro payments are. -- ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :Surveillance cameras|Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :aren't security. A |share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:camera won't stop a |monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :masked killer, but |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :will violate privacy|site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------