« HITs for HAL | Main | Cute puppy or fist in face? » Search is a commodity (again) November 07, 2005 Until Google came along, internet search suffered from two big problems as a business. First, it was hard to make money off the end users (as a result, search engines had become commodity services sold to and rebranded by portals) and, second, switching costs were low (there was little to stop use