A wealth of search

There appears to be momentum gaining for newer types of search engines - engines that pay people for how much their words have been looked at and/or used as a reference by other folks. The more the attention you get, the more you get paid. Topsy (www.topsy.com), a search engine, that is focused on redefining search by not only looking at how many times your pages are linked but also who is linking it and how it is linked, may be trying to usher in an Internet version of getting paid for the influence one commands among a community. While the scale of such search engines may not match the generic engines such as Google or the redesign MSN engine Bing, there exists a reasonable business case for such engines to coexist with or within large search engines. The question is how far will this paradigm be extended? Will we see a day where search results are returned based on precisely how the author of the content wants it to be shown - to the most relevant community and to the persons commanding the higher influences within it?