Bidding for ranking search results

Greetings Microsoft and members of the community,

Congratulations on Microsoft's great accomplishments. This is a proposal for Microsoft to add to its offerings a functionality where each user can bid to rank the user's own submitted search result for a given search term, and searchers can see how much was bid for each result for that search term. The highest bids get the highest rankings.

This is essentially a list of advertising that discloses the dollar amount bid for each result, ordered from greatest to least amount bid. The benefit to the searcher is that these ads are transparent statements of value: that the content is monetarily valued by the bidder to be seen as valued. For example, a bid for a result for the search term "aged care housing statistics" could be called advertising but it could also be seen as a statement that this content is valued and is to be seen as valued in a transparent and comparable sense.

Structured, transparent competition and collaboration of this kind will help deliver a story of what is valued from those willing to pay something to be heard, for those who are serious about search.

Encyclopedic function

For search terms that have an encyclopedic, including news backgrounder, function, there can be included in the description that the website linked to is an alternative to online encyclopedias including Wikipedia. There would be nothing to stop Wikipedia from being linked to in the body of the website that has the bid for ranking. For bids that have continued for a certain period of time, there could be an option to retain the result at the bottom of the rankings for a longer period of time even without consistent payments in the form of bids.

Rationale

Current search functionalities do allow bidding for ad placement (such as Microsoft Advertising) but they do not allow the searcher to view how much was bid, nor do they rank bids and their results next to each other for a given search term. With this shortfall addressed, searchers can find serious results and know how serious the results are. Bidders can reach such searchers.

Results can be subject to normal testing of the marketplace of ideas such as consistency with other sources, ring of truth, and following footnotes. However, what is proposed is a structure that lets searchers see how much a bidder stands behind a result. This functionality may not be the complete search for truth, but it identifies and prioritizes meaningful content from the internet. On-demand prioritization amid a sea of information is what makes this idea a sound approach to finding truth, maybe not every time but over the long-term using market principles, especially if combined with objective journalism to cover search results.

I look forward to hearing any of your thoughts about this idea.

Sincerely,