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Search Engine Payola
Cranial Dome writes: "The top four portals -- MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and Terra Lycos -- all have search results tainted by their acceptance of money for listings, according to this article in the Washington Post. Of the top search engines and portals (including Alta Vista, Inktomi, and Lycos), only Google has vowed to NOT accept money from companies for guaranteed placement in search results. Another reason to love the Google thang."
I swear I want to make love to this company..
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Yeah! In Google you can trust! Congratulations Google!
Didn't we all already know this?
"Ask me about Loom"
I'm glad to see someone out there is not being corrupted by the corporate greed.
I had a change to first post and i let it pass. What was I thinking!
people still use search engines that arent google? hmm...
why?
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no wonder you can never find what you need to on other search sites, they all have to many people paying to get on the list. I only use google, because if you really want to find what you are looking for, today, then that is the only way.
It is also very fast, and is a stunning display of Linux capability.
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
It also turns out that some webmasters run banner ads on their websites, being paid money by corporations for key product placement. At a site like Slashdot, for instance, more than a million pages are viewed each day, and the ads are seen there, too.
Finally, it turns out that sarcastic responses on the above-mentioned Slashdot site are often met with poor ratings and insulting replies. Details to follow...
It's revenue.
Read their information about submitting your site to their search engines and the available enhanced listings, listing options etc. This is nothing new.
What I like to see is Google's far more elegant solution of providing real unadulterated search results, while still providing a paid option on the side. The other engines would do well to adopt a similar model.
Google *does* accept money for putting links.
The difference is that Google does it in a straight forward way, and marks those links as "Sponsored links".
You can buy a link on the search of a word for a fairly low price.
See http://www.google.com/ads/ for the detials.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Try to search for something containing 'computer' or 'camera' and see.
> Another reason to love the Google thang
How long until the laws of (current) economics catch up with Google, and they can no longer afford to do the right thing?
Does anyone have any insight into Google's money situation? Where the money comes from? Are they are taking losses on traffic? Could they economically handle disillutioned surgers from all the other search engines?
Or is it just that the other search engines will do anything for a buck?
"Old man yells at systemd"
Hum, maybe the don't rank the listing by accepting money, but they do display ads just above the listings ... these aren't easy to indentify for a newbie, so ... yeah!
Life sucks.
Anyone who runs their own web site knows that Google dominates the search engine world. Over 80% of my referrals come from google and my webmaster friends report similar statistics. All other search engines are on the margins
Why not just pull up their site and hump your monitor screen like you do when you hit the porn sites?
Cunning linguists
The sad thing is that the search engines who are altering their search results for hire are tainting the very product they sell, thus diminishing the public's desire to use them at all.
Using Dogpile, which searches many of the popular search engines either have no matches or send me to somewhat unrelated stuff. (Wilshire 5000. Powerman 5000. Why?)
But on Google, I get 14 Slashdot post links, which seems a lot more relevant to the original search terms.
I guess sites like MP3.com have paid the other engines quite well. Gotta love Google and their text-matching-only searching.
Are there any open source search engines out there? Of course the hardware required for such a site is immense, but perhaps some sort of P2P solution could be devised.
I only say it because one day google could fall prey to money like the others and we will be back in the same boat. Do we really need an organization to catolog our web, or can we do it ourselves.
Hey everybody, search for popular words and waste the sponsors money! /. them out of buisness!
What about Loom?
Are you speaking of the old PC video game?
In fairness, most portals attempt to separate their paid listings from their unbiased search results with labels. Terra Lycos calls paid links "sponsored sites," AOL "sponsored links." Netscape labels them more ambiguously "partner search results."
I use Yahoo! religiously. It is completely unequivocal about which hits are sponsored (read: bought) and which are not. Yahoo! uses Google for results not in their hierarchical database (though admittedly, not as powerful as using Google directly). This story is about as titillating as the fact Windows Media player caches a list of media you've played on YOUR machine (scandalous!). However, while I enjoy an opportunity to take MS down a notch with FUD, I will not stand for such abuse for my beloved portal, Yahoo!.
I wonder if the success of Google could be driving the other search engines under. Using payed placements is as about as good a way as any to shoot yourself in the foot. The largest users of search engines are likely techies like us who would not only realize that often the good sites are the ones that wouldn't have the money to pay for good placements but these people would also be the ones most likely to object to being fed information like this on a moral point. Does anyone know how AltaVista's been doing since they started accepting money for placements? This move strikes me as more a move of desperation than anything else.
I stole this Sig
"Overture currently is the most successful Internet ad network. It reported $288 million in revenue last year and turned a profit, a rarity for Internet ventures. As an incentive to show its paid listings first, Overture forked over more than half of its ad revenue to sites displaying its results. "
Aside from using Google, is there any other way to avoid contributing to this company? Do they have any domain names I can add to my junkbuster blockfile?
and i even get many crap hits because even one single word in search string turns up my pages.
i have never paid a penny to google.
i respect google ( and hope they keep my pages ranked high).
av, lycos-hotbot, is also good. I'm not mentioning yahoo since it is a directory really.
many small startup search engines are in the doldrums. hope they survive.
Is yahoo modifying the results so that their customer's searches appear near the top?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
After all, who wants to search for plaid boxer shorts and actually come up with PLAID BOXER SHORTS? My goodness, it would create ANARCHY! No, when I search for something I want it to come up with whatever they WANT to show me, not what I wanted! Why, those websites will certainly distract me from whatever it was I was searching for in favor of purchasing their fine wares! And that's what I want; I want to be a mindless sheep that clicks on every link and goggles at every banner ad that gets put in front of me.
Useless opinions, worthless observations, and more!
My guess is that Google is by far the top choice for searches (granted the default msn.com search page for windows users is probably close).
With all this info, whatever happened to the huge google IPO we all heard about? Did that just sneak by under my nose or is it still in the works?
Celebrate Steak and a Blowjob Day!
Now it is up to the internet community to support the good services and keep them alive when money gets short. Google depends on the internet savvy surfers to bring it income, through advertisements, or donations, or even submitting ideas/programs to help them expand thier services. Yahoo, AltaVista, etc depend on the "Portal" concept where they provide everything for the user, Google provides a quality service for next to nothing.
Support quality companies and keep Google afloat!
00110100 00110010
It's great that Google doesn't do the payola thing, but they're a business like any other so one has to question how long they can continue to do so. They take ads, and they even do targeted advertising based on the keywords that you type in. Can payola be far behind?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
That's from a very cool recent interview with him from CNN.
only Google has vowed to NOT accept money from companies for guaranteed placement in search results.
I think "vowed" is a bit strong of a word since Google does take money for (quote from that page) an enhanced text link appears at the top of the Google result page whenever the keyword or phrase you have purchased is searched for by one of our users.
Don't get me wrong, I've Google and have used them for a couple years (or however long, I'm honestly not sure), but I'm just pointing out that the statement fo vowed to not to accept money for guaranteed placement is drop dead wrong. Not even a streth, just dead wrong.
P.S. That enhanced text link they speak of can't (as far as I can tell) be opened in a seperate window. It forses the focal window to honor the link request...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
The conflict here is that search engines were originally set up as public utilities, not by rule of law, but simply by intention. They would do the best job of indexing that they could and sort the search results as best they could.
In reality, they are private applications that can run any way the owner sees fit, but they really should not present themselves as an "Internet user's aid," if they are really behaving like an advertising tool.
Television and radio ads are a different story because there is no pretense that the commercial plays because you asked for information on floor polish or 1-900-SEX-GIRLZ, but because the provider of the service or product paid to have it aired at that time.
There are laws governing what commercials are allowed to claim for their products or services, and we also need enforcable laws which name the conditions under which you can call your service a "search engine." One such condition should certainly be Impartiality, no payment accepted for listing. I would pay Google 3.50 per month for a service that strives for objectivity (I say 3.50 because that's how much I pay each month for online access to Consumer Reports).
The First Annual Google Programming Contest shows how google will always be the best around. Join the contest know!!! You might win:
Grand Prize
$10,000 in cash
VIP visit to Google Inc. in Mountain View, California
Potentially run your prize-winning code on Google's multi-billion document repository (circumstances permitting)
>"Yellow pages pay for the printing and distribution of white pages"
Sigh. Yeah, but the Yellow Pages are not called a "Search Engine". They are called a "Directory Listing". It's much more obvious to people that ads are ads, listings are listings, and none of the entries are there out of the goodness of the Yellow Page publishers' hearts.
A better analogy would be to 'merge' the yellow pages with the white pages. Assume there are 425,432 people named 'Mike Smith'. Finding Mike Smith's phone number is annoying. But now you have to deal with 500,000 more bought (even if indicated on the page) 'Mike Smiths'. Its not even so much that people are fooled into thinking commercial entries with non-commercial, but rather that the sponsorship of the product is getting in the way of the original intent of the product. In this case, now you have one million Mike Smith entries to check out. In the case of web searches, that page with the result you wanted might have been the 4th page without sponsored entries, but now it's on the 30th page.
There's nothing wrong with sponsorship, but everything wrong with it when it reduces the effectiveness of the product or service it's financially supporting. I mean, whats the point?
"Old man yells at systemd"
1) Before we cheer on the good corporate ethics of Google, let's remember that this is a company just like any other. Their goal is to make a profit, not benefit the community. Right now they'll profit more by not tainting their search results. But there's nothing to stop them from changing their minds and selling out later.
2) There's also nothing stopping another company from buying them out in the future and changing their advertisment/search results policy.
3) The article said that E-Bay pays 10-11 cents per click-through to their site. Why not write a script that repeatedly goes to the site through Yahoo? You'd tie up their bandwidth and cost them a fortune.
4) Lastly, what's to stop microsoft from paying top dollar for searches including the words "Linux," "open source," and "monopoly"?
Teaching, coding, coffee, revolution.
Let's collect a "Slashdot appreciates your integrity" charity fund for Google.
Google rocks. Go to images.google.com. Turn the adult content filter off. Type in thongs. You very quickly get to see this image, which frankly, made my day.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
google gets paid too. they all do. your statement is wrong.
What?! What are you talking about. Searching Yahoo, altavista and others was the best way to get irrelivant porn! :)
:)
Or is that images.google.com
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Does anyone actually click on that garbage anyway? Personally, I don't even get one glimpse of that stuff...my eyes have been trained to ignore it.
It just seems to me that all the search engines are trying desparately to find some way of making money. After they found out that banner ads don't work, they resort to trying something completely lame. They'll one day learn that users hate to wade through trash to find one decent page.
Isn't it false advertising if the search results aren't pure?
A search engine advertises searching services for my patronage. If I go there and perform a search that comes back altered but does not tell me what results are not part of the real result set then I have been cheated.
Not only that, but many other sites who did not pay for listings have been misrepresented.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
I work for a major hosting company for adult (yes, XXX) web sites. Our sites are very well ranked on all search engines. On some search engines, this is because we gave money (sometimes to be the only one to bring answers for specific keywords) . But we're also very well ranked on Google because of mass spamming.
99% of the pages we submit to Google aren't real sites. We buy a lot of domains (with explicit keywords) . Then, out of every domain, we do tons of subdomains with other keywords. All related web sites are different. But they only have one page, automatically generated by sets of scripts. These pages have randomly chosen keywords and pictures, and every fake site have links to a dozen of other fake sites. On all sites, there's only one link to a real site. A real user will immediately catch the right link (because it's a big picture, it has a caption like "click here to access the site", etc) . But search engines are crawling.
Googles gives better ranking to web sites that have a lot of other web sites linking it. So we abuse that. All our sites have excellent scoring because fake sites are referring other fake sites. It takes 10 minutes to automatically generate hundreds of fake sites. Apache's mod_rewrite is extensively used. We have an entiere team devoted to reading mailing-lists of search engine software (like ASPSeek... Google uses a lot of ASPSeek ideas), in order to abuse search engines.
So although Google's ranking doesn't depend on money, it isn't fair. It depends on how people are cheating with it.
PS: I don't support what the company is doing, it's a shame, and I'm looking for a new job.
{{.sig}}
Where is the vow that slashdot will not accept money from companies for having "news" stories written about them? How do we know that google didn't pay for this ad we're reading now?
I don't understand why this is a big deal. I mean, these guys gotta make money somehow. Besides, if you're going to a web site based on the fact that it was listed first by the search engine, then whatever you're researching probably isn't that important. And if I am looking for information on quantum mechanics and the search engine only lists links to chemistry sets at Wal-Mart, then I'm going to use another search engine. I think most people are smart enough to figure this sort of thing out.
Smeghead every day of the week.
Ouch. Seach-engine lovin' ain't worth this kinda bruisin'.
Which reminds me: Precious, precious geek humor last week.
But I, for one, am neither shocked nor appalled by this realization!
Search engines are essentially a very useful service provided to the public by for-profit companies at no direct cost to the individual - they are FREE! They are one of the few remaining offerings in the world that meet the 'something-for-nothing' criteria...
Of course, the companies that provide these services are not exactly doing this out of the goodness of their heart. They compete amongst the other search engines to win to win favor with the users and then turn their daily page hits into advertising dollars via banners, pop-up's and other such advertising... Now that web advertising has slowed with the rest of the world economy, how long did you truly think it would take before the parent companies and investors demanded further, less principled tactics to increase profits? Obviously, not long...
And here comes the stinger...I don't thing there is anything wrong with this. Ultimately, the companies that back search engines have a business to run - this requires revenue. No revenue, no search engines....and exactly where do you think that would leave us all in the jungle of information that is now the internet!
And as for Google, I applaud there adherence to morals and integrity. But don't think that if it comes down to it, they will not do whatever is necessary (including accepting money for search placement) to stay afloat in tough economic times. And I would want them too - a slightly corrupt Google is better than no Google at all!!!
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
I remember an amusing story about how when you typed the keywords "dumb motherf---er" into google, how the first result you would get back would be a link to George W. Bush's campaign page. Now when you type it in, you get a link to a Wired article describing the phenomena. For this keyword, the search has become meta.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Acception money in certain industry for ranking is viewed as very bad. Especially bad for those who try are in the "rating products" game. For instance could Consumer Reports weild the command and power they have if they accepted outside money? Probably not. Consumer Reports is all about building the reputation that you can believe their findings because they have a reputation of never bowing to manufacture's pressure because they accept none of their money. No money means no pressure to bias.
Maybe it is high time people realize that search engines that "slight" there returned results a probably not as accurate or as trusted. In the back of my mind I never touch Yahoo, MS, et al for broad internet searches because I can't convince myself they'll produce an accurate unbiased list of hits.
Or in short, why should I believe Yahoo's search results over MSN's? Why should even try either when I know Google will give me many more hits in an unbias manner?
"Another reason to love the Google thang."
Did anyone else read that as the Google thong?
No?
> How long until the laws of (current) economics
:-).
> catch up with Google, and they can no longer
> afford to do the right thing?
It could be quite a while. Google is profitable, and the click-through rate on the ads that you *CAN* purchase from them (clearly demarcated as ads) is phenomenal. They're doing fine.
> Does anyone have any insight into Google's
> money situation? Where the money comes from?
Google stays profitable by aggressively negotiating bandwidth from several suppliers. The guy who runs the network there is a former coworker of mine. In fact, I'm logged into his computer right now
> Are they are taking losses on traffic? Could
> they economically handle disillutioned surgers
> from all the other search engines?
See above. In short, yes, but this depends on the economic climate and the willingness of the networks to play ball.
> Or is it just that the other search engines
> will do anything for a buck?
IMHO, yes.
Realistically, when was the last time someone asked you to Yahoo! or Altavista their next blind date? Google is a societal totem and if they fell prey to financial weakness, they would be snapped up immediately. John Doerr, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin have not allowed that to happen to their creation. I salute them, and all of my friends and coworkers who went to work for them. It is a great product and makes its own markets.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Hey Slashdot.... I'll pay you .10 cents for better placement. .50 cents for First post.
P.S. That enhanced text link they speak of [Sponsored Links above and beside Google search results] can't (as far as I can tell) be opened in a seperate window.
Huh? I tried middle-clicking and right-clicking in Mozilla 2002022603 on Windows ME; both methods correctly opened new windows on all Sponsored Links that I tried. Anyone else?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Hmm... so eBay is paying 11 cents a click? What if we all go over to AltaVista, for example, type "George Bush" in the box, click "Search," and click on the eBay link without buying anything? At 11 cents a click times thousands and thousands of viewers... ;-)
a slightly corrupt Google is better than no Google at all!!!
A slightly corrupt Google ceases to be Google. I can see no reason why Google would have to mix its sponsored links with the rest of the results.
Will I retire or break 10K?
so... there's the potential for Google to cache a webpage containing the DeCSS source code in UUEncoded format. what are the legal ramifications? has this sort of thing already happened?
i ask, since if i'm at a friends house on their wintel box, and i need a program i download it. need a registration number? 13 minutes and google.com, i've found a cached page with the info i want.
food for thought.
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
Google is not all high and mighty, they accept plenty of money for their "Sponsored Links", which are advertisements, but appear almost identical to search results, and appear at the top of the results. For example, a search for "compilers" will yield the following result:
Intel® COMPILER - Improve Application Performance
www.intel.com/software/products
how about... "stocks"
Convenient account access. Powerful tools. Advanced trading technology.
www.ameritrade.com
The average computer user (my mom), would see this as the first result to her search.. but really its a well disguised advertisement.
Google is great, don't get me wrong.. but before you go bashing other engines for taking money for guaranteed links, you should bash Google for their manipulative and sneaky ads.
not to mention the 3 friggin pop-up windows that go along with it... >=[ Death to pop-ups!
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
No one complains about this practice. There's no doubt that the more you pay, the more prominently you're displayed. How is this different than a search site? In fact, the YP is even worse than the search sites. If you don't pay at all, you're given a crap listing in the White Pages. You don't even turn up in a search by category.
I guess you could argue that a search site is supposed to return the most relivant sites first. Or, at least, people might think that. But, one could argue that a search should return the sites that most useful or at least somewhat useful.
Or, you could look at it this way: without ad revenue, there would be no search site at all, and that would be worse, right?
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
The answer is yes, definitely. A well-optimized campaign of paid search terms at Overture (formerly GoTo.com), can result in huge increases in relevant traffic and sales.
Many search engines, including Google, don't provide relevant information because they are bloated with spam (spoofed web pages, often for porn sites) and they also can't keep up with new submissions (so relevant content never gets indexed). Google certainly remains the best place to find certain types of information, but if you use Google to search for a specific consumer product, you'll get mostly garbage.
In late 2000, I designed the paid-search strategy for MovieGoods.com, which sells movie posters. We submitted about 450,000 unique search terms (including several variations for each actor/actress name, director, movie title, and movie theme), and GoTo.com approved about 27,000 of them (they won't let you buy a search term unless their records show that it has been searched more than 10 times in the past 90 days).
Of course, for a company like MovieGoods, a huge portion of traffic comes from people who search for simple terms like "movie poster" (the top ten search terms probably drive 60% of the GoTo/Overture-sourced traffic). But the other 25,000 search terms (like "Fellowship of the Ring movie poster" or "Antonio Banderas posters") drive a lot of sales, and usually at a very low cost.
For a merchant like MovieGoods, the key is to carefully track the performance of each search term: I determined how many dollars of sales were generated by each search phrase, and how much we spent, and we achieved a simple balance: for every $1 we spent at GoTo/Overture, we generated $6 in sales.
And consumers also benefitted by finding exactly what they were looking for. Yes, Overture does allow some off-topic bidding, but they are trying to crack down on it so that only genuinely responsive links come up in the paid listings.
Of course, some consumers ignore the paid results on search engines (including Google, which does sell top-of-list placement and right-margin AdWords, so they are NOT so much holier than the others). But like so many "bad things" on the internet, paid results work for the merchants and often for the consumer.
There are some interesting issues: for example, if I search for "MovieGoods" and a competitor bids for the #1 position for that term, there are some real concerns. There have even been lawsuits over this issue (really not much different, legally, than the "Meta Keyword" disputes).
Of course, if the result said "Click Here for MovieGoods" and instead the consumer is misdirected to a competitor (or to a porn site), then it's just not right, but I haven't seen much of this type of abuse (and Overture prohibits it, though as you'd expect they don't check all listings as carefully as some folks would like).
Also, every major search engine (including Yahoo, Alta Vista, Google, Lycos, and more) is pretty clear at distinguishing the "paid" results from the regular results. Usually the paid listings are in a different font style or size, bold or not, indented differently, or boxed to stand apart from other results.
Finally, note that on many search engines, there are multiple paid-placement opportunities. For example, on Yahoo, there are pay-per-click results from Overture, then there are paid "sponsored links," and then there are the "most popular links" which generally are the paid sponsors since the sponsor links are shown first and thus get clicked most often. On Google, there are left-margin "AdWords" as well as top-of-list placements. And everybody sells banner ads and often buttons also.
These days, most of my time is spent on designing "cost-effective marketing" campaigns, with strong emphasis on optimizing paid-search-engine placements, affiliate programs, and of course traditional search-engine-optimization strategies.
The key is that I can achieve that $5 return on every dollar spent on these strategies, but banner ads and other types of advertising rarely return even $2 in sales for every dollar spent (and often the return is pennies on the dollar). That explains why banner ad rates have plummetted so far, so fast. And it explains why the content-versus-advertising borders are getting fuzzier.
(Here on Slashdot, people complain all the time about those FatBrain links in book reviews, which will vanish in a day or two since B&N acquired FatBrain and is discontinuing the generous FatBrain affiliate program.)
-- Mark J. Welch, Internet Performance Marketing Consultant
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/consult.htm
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/ Pleasanton California
That's because eBay and Amazon lately have been top bidders for the George Bush "keyword," offering 11 cents and 10 cents, respectively, for each click-through a search engine delivers.
So by clicking on these repetedly we can cost eBay and Amazon loads of money!! However doing so supports the search engines whom have sold search placements....
To click, or not to click, that is the question.
eBay
Amazon
I stole this Sig
If Google does eventually need to consider doing something drastic to make money, I certainly hope they come to us instead of ad companies. I would easily pay something like $100/year to use Google provided it was clear of ads and sponsored links. Even my employer would pony up the cash for it. It *is* that much better than other search engines. However, the 'donation' method sucks as a lot people just don't bother to pay up. It would have to be a premiere service. Ad up the free stuff all you want but techies will pay to avoid all the crap - that's why we started dealing with Google in the first place. I'd have no problem paying for that from Google and it's better than the alternative.
I saw this in the Post while eating breakfast and thought "Submit to slash? Nah, we all already know about it."
Best Slashdot Co
so YOU'RE the bastards that have been screwing up my porn searches(@*(@(
um
i mean...
never mind.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
It feels unethical to me for a search engine to take money for top spots. I'm not saying it should be illegal, don't get me wrong - I'm as libertarian as the next guy - but it feels somewhere between sleazy and fraudulent.
Imagine if you called directory assistance and asked for the number for Burger King, and they instead gave you the number for McDonalds (since McDonalds paid a hefty sum), and then only after a pause gave you Burger King's number. Or if Channel 5 listed the top ten films at the box office, and showed you all Paramount films as being at the top (since Paramount paid Channel 5). It's dishonest.
So what can we do about it? Use Google instead. And click their ads occasionally.
Don't blame me; I voted for CowboyNeal.
You're the one who fucks up my searches for "vagina" and "moist pussy", not to mention "big stretched-out asshole". Fuck you bastard!
This is the reason I use Google over the others. It works, it works, it works. Plus it is not tainted the way the big boys, err I mean big companies want to "help you". It reminds me more of the GNU/Linux/BSD thing. Not the open source part, but the part where everything is treated equal no matter who you work for.
Scott
janitor
sdn website family
email: scott at sboss dot net
Just don't visit sites that do Paid Inclusion, or realize that some results may be "tainted". Personally, I still find that All The Web still gives decent results for most things. This is because, it seems like All The Web & Google have this thing about who can get the most pages indexed.
For a good list of what search engines show what ads in what ways, check out this page at Search Engine Watch.
Okay, not only do they have 'sponsored links', but now they have pop-unders, and those obnoxious overlayed flash ads.
I knew there was a reason I hadn't used any engine other than Google for a long time now...
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Almost every one of the search engines mentioned makes a very clear distinction between paid placements and search results. This is not about Yahoo sprinkling paid placement links in its search results and pretending they're real. Even the worst offender, Dogpile, lists results by search engine, rather than pretending they're all real searches from the same source.
Yes, they could be clearer, but this isn't nearly as bad as the hysterical submitter wants you to believe. In some ways, it's good. Do a search for Ted Bundy on Yahoo and you'll see a paid link to our site (not gonna tell you which one). Of the people who click that link, most end up pretty happy because we've got some cool stuff.
Overture is the company that puts must of these paid links in searches; we pay them, they pay Yahoo. Overture's standards for search terms are breathtaking - I've spent over a month arguing with them about search terms which are exactly applicable to what we're selling. They go out of their way not to be deceptive.
Of course Google will say that Overture's not a real search engine - Google's competing with them for the same market. Hello! Google isn't some great white knight, immune from the evils of capitalism. They're the best search engine by far, but their AdWords program sucks ass compared with Overture's. This whole article reads like a Google press release. Contrary to what they say, it's much much easier to get a deceptive ad in Google AdWords than in Overture (not that we've tried - it would be a waste of money).
Unless I'm looking to buy something, I avoid Overture and all the sites they sell ads to. If I am looking to buy something, Overture is a great tool to start. For knowledge, and obscure or very specific searches, of course, nothing beats Google.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
You get a job with google and work on combatting all the damage you've done.
strange to see you at +3...
are you implying that your nick is *not* based on "Powerman 5000"?
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Didn't notice myself, konqueror let's me stop javascript from opening popup windows without my consent...
Post links, please!
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
The Slashdot Intro is misleading in my opinion. The main point is GOOGLE is moving into the Bidded Placement Business. Look at a google result set - 2 sponsored listings at top, 3 on the side.
:-) ? :) and hold a patent on the model.
:) I personally don't feel guilty :)
:-))
z ovos+6gB3e8+ digphot.html $0.54
. asp?sid=46 860012 $0.53
1 3;n?ht tp://www.staples.com/catalog/search/Search_Sum.asp ?PageType=2&SearchPageType=2&cromulent=&Keywords=d igital+camera&Area=All+Areas $0.51
The article compares Overture and Google, and for an example tried Digital Cameras... These results seem identical in relevance to me. I think the main point she missed in the article is that the bidding model forces advertisers into being relevant for what they bid on. If not they lose revenue every time some clicks but does not buy. This of course applies to Google as well now that they finally caught on.
As for the claim by Google that they are pure:
(1) Why are they getting into the Ad search business
(2) AOL, MSN and everyone else would just put Google's ads in the same place as they did before - as Google does with it sponsored listings.
(3) Google is clearly trying to move in on our profitable business model - perhaps they are the ones that should be tainted with the impure results brush - we have always simply served bidded line listings
Try "hotel in france" on Google and Overture's site -- and compare -- in fact Google has two sets of listings, their so called Sponsored ones, and their Ad Words. In this case they come up with just "Sponsored" ads, which actually look like their search listings. And they are general hotel ads, not French Hotels.
Just some stuff to think about
Winton (an Overture employee
OVERTURE:
1. Digital Cameras at ZoVoS.com
Shop ZoVoS Electronics for digital cameras and more. Low prices, free shipping, fast processing and no sales tax - it's time to expect more: ZoVoS.com.
http://store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/clink?
2. Don't Buy It Before You PriceSCAN It!
PriceSCAN is your unbiased guide to finding the lowest prices on digital cameras.
http://www.pricescan.com/home_digiphoto
3. Digital cameras at Staples.com
From digital cameras to Palm Pilots, laptops to toner, cartridges to office furniture, you'll find the best deals at Staples.com. Plus, get free shipping on product orders over $50.
http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;3427561;64776
GOOGLE
DIGITAL CAMERAS for LESS!
Free Shipping, Low Prices, Fast
Order Processing, No Sales Tax!
www.zovos.com
Digital Camera Sale!
Sony, Olympus, Nikon, Canon, Pentax
Minolta, Cameras & Camcorders
CameraClub.com
PriceSCAN.com
Save money! Don't Buy It
Before You PriceSCAN It!
www.pricescan.com
Dont their "sponsored links" that appear on the on the page do the exactly what they claim that they will never do?
I'm not saying that Googles results are tainted, but in a way they are. If you do a search on Google for computer hardware the first two links to appear are sponsored links by Dell and Amazon. There are also three other sponsored links (obviously not as expensive as the top two) on the right side of the page. I really think that Google is doing it right, but them saying that they don't take dollars for search result placement is a bit misleading.
I just take a little issue with Google claiming that they are "above" the whole marketing thing. Google has to make a buck just like everyone else, and that is fine, just please don't do it and act like you don't, that just makes you look like a politician.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
TrollMan 5000 and the variant PowerTroll 5000 are both tips of the hat to the now-defunct Powerman 5000.
However, I was implying that Google searches are much more precise, giving results that match your search criteria (in this case "TrollMan 5000 Slashdot"), not just ones that are related, and not based on who pays them the most.
-TM5K
I wanted to find out the price of the new search box, so I entered ' "google search appliance" price ' in google. The second link had the price ($20,000-$250,000), and the sponsored link is Inktomi's enterprise search solution.
Check out the search here.
Very clever.
Google's biggest income source is the licensing of their search technology out as intranet solutions. Of late, there was a story about Google's new search-engine-in-box, a rack-mountable, scalable solution for companies looking to search-index all internal documents.
This is contrary to statements that have been made by Google executives and considering that they just launched their Google Search Appliance two weeks ago it highly unlikely that it is thier primary source of income.
Here's a link to the C|Net article which states that most of their revenue comes from ads
... but that would be just too damned logical.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
m.mmm..myyy
I have noticed that the quality of Google hits has been dropping dramatically as people study these techniques.
DMOZ is one of my favorite engines because people look at the pages at least. Of course, DMOZ is owned by AOL now, and will be subject to the AOL agendas.
Since Google calculates the number of links to different sites in its weight calculation, I try to make sure all of my sites have a rich index to high quality sites, but it seems that promoting quality is an uphill battle.
This is one thing that has me worried about the internet. The one common thread that ties us all together on the internet is the need to find information on the billions of pages that exist.
... a specific filename or person's name ... the pay per click sites are utterly useless. Google is the only search engine that maintains a complete virgin index and keeps the paid links outside the virgin links.
The search engines have a right to make money. No one doubts that at all. They are for profit and they need to make money.
With that said the only pure player in the space is google, which is sad. Sad because when you know what you're looking for
If Google were to ever change we're all screwed.
The pay per click engines are fantastic for sites that sell things, but for sites with content they are abyssmal.
I would venture to say that 50% of the sites on the internet with content are not making money at all, but are labors of love. With that said you're alienating 50% of the sites when you move to a pay per click metaphor.
As a webmaster of a content site I can attest to others claims that Google is responsible for 80% of our hits. Links from other content pages is 10% and pay per click sites, which we don't pay for, are 10% more.
As long as Google is alive and uses the searching dynamic they do the internet can be a very useful tool for information. If they go to straight pay per click we're all screwed.
The story is incorrect, in that Google does in fact receive payment for ad placement. The only difference being that Google makes it blatantly obvious (via background coloring) who their paying advertisers are. See http://www.google.com/ads/ for further information.
Kris
Good lord. It's amazing your computer doesn't sprout legs and kick your pasty white ass for putting such crap suck humor...ugh, I'm feeling dirty just thinking about you.
30 first results didn't have the site i was looking for.
Maybe google should institute some penalties. If a site is found abusing the system - ban it for all time - or at least send it far down the list.
Last post!
This is sorta like when Slashdot publishes stories about useless new toys like MP3 players, right?
Liberty in your lifetime
ie: Rejecting advertisers who market firearms or ammunition. I didn't think it was up to service providers to set social agendas. Seems that is just not the case.
I won't spend a dime with them, and wish I could use another engine that worked.
Holy god...I didn't even realize those were there(the sponsored results, that is.) I wonder how much crap falls into my blind spot? Hmm, better say something bright to remain on topic. :^)
I worked at GEFA-PMG for a short while. We were buying links on goto.com as a matter of course for the e-commerce sites we maintained. It irked me, but it made sense. After all, goto.com was never intended to be a true search engine. Rather, it intended to be the ultimate in direct marketing-a search engine over advertisements.
And now maybe you would care to explain when it is you developped this thong fetish, and how often do you search for thong images online?
:)
Google should have a preselected list of "root" nodes where it starts following links from (say, a large number of personal homepages of real living people) and follow it only upto some TTL.
I don't think very many of them would link to spam sites..
Google may not accept payment for placement, but at least one unscrupulous organization knows how to manipulate their way to the top of search results.
The cult of L. Ron Hubbard has managed to keep all critical sites off of the first page of search results for "scientology" using a vast web of cookie-cutter home pages and domain names all linking to one another.
Check this out for a full description of how they did it.
From here.
"Last year, however, Google did follow competitors in offering sponsored links - a form of advertising based on search terms - on the top and left of search results. Today such advertising accounts for two-thirds of Google's revenues, with the remainder coming from powering searches on other Web sites, including that of Yahoo. Observers have wondered whether Google's business model can survive, especially given the downturn in Internet advertising. Schmidt insists that the company has been profitable for the last two quarters, although he declines to disclose numbers."
From here.
"Google's advertising programs enable advertisers to closely match text-based ads with users' search queries. The result is a highly targeted service that consistently produces an average click-through rate four to five times higher than the industry average for traditional banner advertising. Google provides advertisers with a full complement of monitoring services to ensure the best results. Online advertisers, such as Acura, Expedia, Eddie Bauer, Ernst & Young and REI, consistently rank Google as their top online advertising choice."
From here.
"So, where's the business model? To this end, Google has started to diversify its revenue stream. It boasts 100 co-brand partners, such as The Washington Post and Netscape, that have selected Google as an embedded Internet search engine on their site. Most of these co-brand partners pay the company from $8 to $10 per thousand queries and from $600 to $2,000 per month in licensing fees. Google also has a program offering free search capabilities to smaller Web sites, with the caveat that it might begin inserting advertisements on search-query pages at a future date -- but no banner ads.
The company has also instituted a pay-for-play scheme called Adwords that allows an advertiser to purchase a word and place a small text ad on the page whenever that word is mentioned in a query. But Google is making the most money from customized intrasite search functions, built for a dozen select clients, such as router giant Cisco Systems and Linux provider Red Hat."
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find more.
I'm amazed that nobody has yet brought up dmoz.org. They are where AOL, MSN, and others get their *good* links. And porn spammers can't do a thing to fool the dmoz editors!
They're every bit as useful as Google, I recommend them to everyone as the *other* reasonable choice.
Why don't search engines ignore or at least score differently links from subdomains within the same domain? It seems like that might solve the problem...
All the other SEs clearly mark the sponsored listings. Show me one that doesn't.
Attempted karma whore.
I love google.
But I just wanted to say that they need to do a lot of work with there image search engine. I very
rarely get what I'm looking for. Does anyone have any suggestion for a better search engine for images?
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
Google should do reverse lookups of the hostnames and degrade the quality of a result based on what subnet the reference comes from. If a site is recieving lots of references from a particular subnet, it could be determined that that site is spamming. It wouldn't be a ten minute setup process if each site you setup had to be on a different /24.
I can't think of any situations where this would unfairly degrade a user's quality rating...anyone?
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
...since they haven't shelled out the bucks yet for their programming contest yet...
...G$o$o$g$l$e!
(No, we're not biased.)
Google *does not* accept payment for placement in search results. It accepts payment for placement of ADS. Specifically, the more you pay, the higher the probability that your ad will appear (in the sponsored links section). This is not the same thing at all as accepting payment to skew the ordering of their search results.
-raph
It's not that easy. foo.domain.com and bar.domain.com can be totally different sites. For instance my dialup provider, Claranet, gives www..claranet.fr as addresses. There's no reason for Google to differently score customers sites, because they don't have their own domain name.
Also, subdomains are just a quick way to better spam Google, but to promote one single site, my company buys 100+ _real_ domains (whoose names are combinations of keywords related to the target site) .
To fight against this, search engines should detected ping-pong loops between domains, and strong similarities between web sites. Not that easy when you index millions of web pages.
{{.sig}}
Exactly :-)
That is exactly what Overture is. We aren't a traditional Information retreival search engine, and that is exactly what Google is trying to muscle in on.
Look at the results on Earthlink now from Google -- and compare with AOL...
For what its worth I use Google constantly when I'm doing research - but for items I can buy, services I need, I'd prefer Overture.
Compare and Contrast:
Earthlink Web Search DVD Players
AOL Search for DVD players (Overture)
Winton
...then why are they so stale? They must be having trouble crawing or something, because I have been getting a very large number of dead URLs lately. It's nice they offer a cached image of the site, given that it may no longer be there...
The magic of search engines is that you don't need to submit 1000 links to have them referenced. You submit 10, and Google will crawl the 1000 for you.
But yes, all our domains resolve to 10 IPs among three C classes. There's probably a way for search engines to detect too many loops between different sites that resolves to the same IP, and I hope Google will implement that.
But well... It's just like any form of SPAM. We have mail filters that check RFC conformance, keywords, RBL lists, etc. but we still get more and more mail spam, because spammers use more and more sophisticated software. It's an endless fight. This is really lousy and it degrades the whole internet.
{{.sig}}
Good post...
First of all, for those of you who don't know about the REAL Payola Click... A little to the left... Now down... Right HERE!
Payola - The paying of cash or gifts in exchange for airplay.
It's illegal, and record companies do it EVERY DAY, EVERY SONG through a 3rd party otherwise known as "indies" (Independent Record Promoters)
While I'm at it, here's another link to a Salon article: The Salon Article (They have more)
Not only is it illegal and the record companies essentially pay the radio stations to play thier songs, now the record companies MUST pay the indies, or they will never hear thier songs. (As demonstrated with Pink Floyd when thier label decided to boycott the indies. The result: While Pink Floyd ranked in the sales charts, you couldn't hear them on the radio if you tried for a period of X months in the early 80's.)
Slashdot can be so sensational sometimes they deserve to be mocked, but it sucks when something as blatently corrupt as Payola is potentially minimized as a result.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
If you actually checked, you'd find that while that's mostly true, the #4 result returned is Operation Clambake (Bearing the description: "The fight against Scientology on the Net"), which is probably the biggest and most comprehensive anti-scientology site around.
Perhaps Google should revive the old "More evil than satan himself" search term, this time linking Scientology instead of Microsoft. :) (If you search for it now, you don't get Microsoft: what you get is a bunch of news stories about Google's prank the first time)
http://www.google.com/programming-contest/
I guess all companies are a bit shady...
Hey! Wouldn't that be a good idea for the google programming contest?
Still, this solution is more obviously underhanded than simply paying the search engine, and is therefore less likely to be used by legitimate (non porn) companies. Also, it seems like it would be fairly expensive to buy all of those domains, probably more expensive than buying a high ranking on Lycos, which acts as another disincentive, and will also insure that only the most high margin sites would be able to profit from such a method of self promotion.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
The color scheme on the search page clearly differentiates between the search engine and the ad. I, for one, like the ads on google. Like the searches, they are often useful. I'm also grateful that the ads are distinct from the search. Enjoy the friendly Google while you can, folks. Nothing this good lasts forever.
The middle mind speaks!
That's fine as long as you don't expect any guaranteed placement in search results.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
One word. Mozilla.
I noticed. Needless to say, I only use links from my favorite free website. I no longer use a search engine as I have found the result worthless. (I'm not giving a credit card, email or phone number to anyone in that industry.) What you are doing is the best block to keep underage kids out of porn. Good job. It's just like a spam tarpit for underage kids. They can't find the free uncensored previews easly anymore.
On behalf of perverts searching for porn, let me just say: You bastard!
From the paper: Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Note that if you have a bunch of bogus pages with low pagerank the pagerank for your page is going to be low, no matter how many of these pages you have pointing to you.
They already do that.
Rules, laws, regulations are all pointless. Corporations/politicians/governments have found ways to work around them when they get in the way (they're not POWs because this isn't a war). They rely on the gulibility of the average citizen who will basically believe whatever a guy/girl in a suit tells them.
Unlike people who oppose them, corporations know how to make changes, one slice at a time. Corporations have time and are quite willing to out wait their opposition. Introduce something which isn't really that bad and get the majority of people on side. Wait for people to get used to it, do it again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
They don't have to convince everybody. Just enough so that the people who understand what's going on get shouted down by those who aren't forward looking enough.
As for stupid people I'm not just talking Joe six-pack either. Next time there is a story about a corporation taking libities with your personal data notice the group of people who say "This really isn't such a big deal" and "They've been doing this for years".
Until the majority of people start thinking they will win. So basically the few people who actually think for themselves are screwed and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
All our sites have excellent scoring because fake sites are referring other fake sites.
Right. You should keep in mind that you might have good scoring for queries YOU type. I don't remember seeing any pr0n sites in my search results on Google, and I use it every day, at least 50-100 queries per day.
They did have problems a year ago, when 'cheaters' did get ranking on most queries, but I'd say that time is gone...
Well, actually DMOZ sucks ass. Their porn categories are basically filled with many similar shitty 20pic galleries. Often it becomes just another lame TGP.
Of course you don't have much referals from other search engines because you don't pay them for a better placement in their search results! ;-)
I've heard that DMOZ is pretty corrupt. Most of the "editors" actually own sites in their own category, and they make it really difficult for competitors to get listed.
Thanks for pointing this out -- paid listings are clearly marked on the top sites that partner with Overture. I work to give clients these paid listings, as part of search engine optimization campaigns. The listings I create (and most of those on Overture) require a fair amount of research to learn exactly what terms people type in, to find what they want. Whereas many search results that pop up are questionable in their relevance to search phrases (fewer on Google than on other SEs), the pay-per-click (PPC) listings are quite targeted. My goal is to create very targeted listings, that point to the specific pages on clients' websites most relevant to the keyphrases used in the bid listings. This helps searchers find what they're interested in, and helps my clients make sales to very interested searchers. Personally -- when I'm searching -- as long as paid listings are relevant and useful, I don't care whether I see paid or free listings.
When you quit, report your employer's company anonymously to Google and to Overture. I'm sure they'd love to blacklist all your employers' sites. So would I, for both professional and moral reasons.
anonymously???
he's already posted on slashdot... logged in.
Don't quote me on this.
overture accepts bribes, its the pay per click place, hah