A development in Europe may have some interesting ramifications for search engines. It used to be that the search engine was an amazing thing; a gift to humanity that brought all the world’s online info to your fingertips (some more efficiently than others). Now that search is becoming more commonplace, publishers are starting to wonder if being in the search engines, with their direct links, is really the best thing. Some publishers are recognizing that search engines are stealing revenue. If enough publishers of quality content push back and block the search engines, the content available via free search might just become an information ghetto.

Google has long been regarded as the best of the search engine crowd. Now Google is getting pushed back a bit by the people who provide some of the better content for the Internet. Belgian newspapers have said that it isn’t in their best interest to have their content freely available in search engines, Google in particular. So they went to court. And they won.

Google, the owner of the world’s most-used search engine, must pay $32,500 US a day until it removes all Belgian news content, the Brussels Court of First Instance ruled Tuesday. There’s “no exception” for Google in copyright law, the court said. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said it has already removed the content and will appeal the ruling.

The case may restrict how Internet sites in Europe link to newspaper content. Copiepresse, a group representing French- and German-language newspapers including La Libre Belgique and Le Soir, had sued Google for copyright infringement. The journals lose advertising revenue when Google uses snippets of articles and links directly to stories, bypassing ads on their Web sites, said Bruno Vandermeulen, a Brussels-based lawyer at Bird & Bird.

The implication here is that search engine trick is wearing thin. It just isn’t that big of a deal now for people to be in the Google search index. For some publishers with no other means of exposure, you can see the value of the model. But if you put energy into your content, and you are selling it elsewhere, it may NOT be in your best interest for your content to be reachable by one click from a Google search. more and more publishing businesses may come to this same conclusion.

The future may see one or both of two things: 1) a new search engine model where the content provider/publisher is in on the deal and recovering revenue from search engines like Google who profit immensely from being the biggest instance of what is no longer that big of a trick to pull off. 2) the ghettoization of free search, wherein the search engines like Google are eventually pushed off a lot of the really good content, which becomes accessible only by direct access or by clicking through on paid ads on select websites. This is not the same as membership sites, but rather a category of web publishing that is in between. The content is still free, but how you get there is constrained by copyright law.

Google better think hard about how to maintain its market leadership here. Some enterprising search outfit might come along with a model that includes content providers at the party, and leaves Google in the ghetto with desperate publishers with no other model.