Via John Battelle, Microsoft is supposedly offering enterprise companies credits for pushing MSN Live on their desktops.

"Employees search the web daily with tools from Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo. OEMs and web sites are already earning credits based on searches that their users bring. Now, your organization can earn credits for Microsoft web searches and redeem them for Microsoft or preferred partner deployment and training services. More searches earns more credits towards the services you value."

10,000 desktops could equal $120,000 per year, pretty compelling.

Now I wonder what would happen if a search engine started offering content providers hard cash to permit on their crawlers and block other search engines?