My search engine was down the past couple of days while we updated our database. We have a lot of users that continued to use our search engine, despite the fact that no results would appear.

We have Google AdSense advertisements on all of the search results pages, and users were constantly clicking on the text ads because those were the only results. Our AdSense revenue was HUGE for these two days!! Haha this made me wonder if we should even bother bringing the search results back online.

Anyone ever have this happen to them?

Depends where your priority lie, user or revenue.

Oh of course I would never keep the listings offline. Eventually visitors would stop using the search engine and there would be no traffic or revenue.

Just thought that this was rather interesting.

Something like that happened once when I had a proxy website and the proxy script was down for a couple days.

Just update more often... :D

We have Google AdSense advertisements on all of the search results pages, and users were constantly clicking on the text ads because those were the only results.
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Anyone ever have this happen to them?
Of course plenty of people have... that's pretty much the idea behind so-called "adsense scraper" sites.

The content will "distract" users from clicking the advertisements. Someone was comparing two of his low-usage websites and found out that that a "slippery" site without much relevant content earned more banner/link advertising money than a decent site with some content.

Interresting phenomenon. :)

Defiantly bring back the search results, I'm sure this is why users came to your site in the first place.

Hey copleydesigns, how much did you make btw? If you don't want to share it, than that's OKAY! :)

That happen to me when my proxy script was down i just put the page (normal) with a we be coming back soon where the url box was. My google adsense went into the $100 per day.

coopleydesigns i would do an "update" one every few months...if i were you

You could pull a update every few weeks for a day. That bring in some good income :P