Reading this post about Yahoo Search Subscriptions really made me think. Its worth reading the whole post but this comment in particular stuck with me:

"With the model in place, Yahoo! needs only to expand its range of agreements with sources. But what I’d really like, as I was recently discussing with Naba Barkakati in his blog, is for Google or Yahoo! to act as a subscription broker, much as a university library does on behalf of its students and faculty. Then a premium search service could be offered by subscription: we pay Yahoo! or Google, not the individual sources, for access to large chunks of the hidden Web."

We pay the Search Engine for content, it pays the content provider.

How powerful can these search engines actually get... have we even begun to imagine?