The first comes from people's frustration with technologies like e-book formatters. They don't want to spend hundreds for the software, and even when they do, they have trouble learning to use it.

The solution? A service business that compiles e-books for people. You could even have customers e-mail a photo and story about each family member or friend, and make a photo scrapbook for them. Whatever the purpose of the book, the idea is that the customer can easily download the book when done.

You would also host it on your site for a year or more, with the download link on a page that only the customer knows the address of. They can direct people to the page to give the book away, sell it, or otherwise distribute it to whomever they please. A larger contract might be doing the first high school yearbook in an e-book format (probably already done by the time you read this).

New Internet Search Engine Ideas

You may know that Google and other search engines give preference to sites that are older. It's a part of their search algorithms, and probably a good idea. It does mean, though, that even the best site in the world on a given topic may be nearly impossible to find. This can also happen because the site has too few incoming links (another part of the algorithms).

A solution is a search engine that gives highest priority to new web sites. It might even drop sites from the results once they are six months old, or perhaps always display those older sites on the bottom half of the page. The top results would always be the most relevant sites that are also the newest. This isn't meant to be better than existing search engines, but to serve a niche they don't serve.

Why is this a workable internet business idea? Partly because it would be so different from other search engines would attract attention and usage. Perhaps more importantly, many people would love to check regularly to see what new sites are out there covering "dogs," "backpacking," money making," "baby names," or whatever. Also, new site owners, waiting to show up in Google, would be regular visitors, searching for their own sites.

Another search engine I would like to see is one just for shopping. Imagine searching for "leather coat," and instead of getting sites that happen to use the words and others that know how to optimize, you got 80-word descriptions of various leather jackets, always with the price and other important information. If done well, only fishing poles would be in the results when you typed in "I want to buy a fishing pole."

It could be a paid-inclusion search engine. The user just wants to buy something, without the usual information sites in the results or "Buy leather on Ebay!" advertisements. Results could be randomly presented to start, with the ones getting clicks rising to the top of the results. This would be a democratic placement similar to Google's ads, but with enough information to make it more meaningful than five to ten-word sales pitches.

Can these new ideas work? Only time will tell, but I hope someone tries. In the meantime, I will continue writing articles like this to bring traffic to my sites. It has been the most profitable of the internet business ideas I have tried.