Briggs says the centralized search model is unjust, allowing a few major search engines to reap the vast rewards of pay-per-click advertising revenue. What's more, he believes that click fraud runs rampant on the major networks, with advertisers unable to see who is actually behind the clicks for which they pay.

This year, he took the fight a step further, launching tyBit (tybit.com), a company with a technology designed around a client-side search application model.

"The initial spark that drove the development of tyBit was the dissatisfaction with the search industry's pay per click model," says Briggs. "That grew out of a direct experience we had with search engines, specifically Google, and then on a micro level, a local newspaper. So we said, ?there's a problem, and the solution isn't necessarily litigation because at the end of the day, does that really solve anything, does it change anything?'"

tyBit is intended to help advertisers move away from the centralized search engine model, replacing it with a client side application that distributes Web crawling, indexing and browser content delivery.

"We're using a meta-search product right now," he says, "with a plan in place to turn it into a full-fledged spidering, crawling technology that's going to be capable of dealing with the explosion and explicit growth of the Web."

Briggs says the technology accelerates search and maximizes relevancy, enabling users to instantly submit searches to multiple online directories, major engines and other data sources in the public domain. These results are then displayed in a single window on the user's desktop or PDA.

In March, shortly after its soft launch, tyBit was awarded runner-up for Best New Product at Channel Partner Expo, held in Las Vegas. Hundreds of major companies were in attendance at the event, enabling tyBit to sign up 35 telco, ISP and software partners with a reach of 45 million subscribers worldwide.

The product officially launched two months later at ISPCON Spring 2007 in Orlando, Florida, where Briggs promoted the service in his keynote presentation, offering $1 million in free advertising to the first 1,000 advertisers to come on board. Briggs also announced at the event that he would step down from day-to-day duties at AIT to focus on the new project.
 
While the company set out initially to target telcos and ISPs, says Briggs, a variety of media companies has also approached tyBit interested in discussing partnership, much to his surprise.

"They've got a subscriber base and they want to know how to monetize it," he says, "and the revenue share that we've proposed is extremely robust. We're talking about a 60/40 split of revenue - there's no affiliate program out there that's going to give that kind of kind of share of the advertising dollars."

As the amount of information on the Web grows at an incredible rate, providing relevant search results is becoming increasingly complex. According to Briggs, tyBit hopes to combat this by using grid computing, learning its subscribers' preferences, searching multiple sources and searching local content based on a subscriber's actual location.

And next to eliminating the fraudulent clicks, Briggs says the project's most important objective is leveling the playing field for the search industry by introducing a new element.
 
"Instead of 2007 projected revenues of $17.5 billion stacked between one or two companies," he says, "it could ultimately be spread out across service providers, media companies, carries, and anybody that's subscriber-based."