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."

Comments

Google *

[MrPerfekt]

I swear I want to make love to this company..

use others?

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

people still use search engines that arent google? hmm...

why?

In other news

[Wind_Walker]

It was reported earlier that companies pay television companies for placement on popular television shows. Some companies pay outrageous amounts of money for placement on the annual "Super Bowl" special, shocking people who view PBS.

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...

Re:Google *

[l33t j03]

Why not just pull up their site and hump your monitor screen like you do when you hit the porn sites?

And well it SHOULD be tainted!

[Cirrocco]

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.

Re:As a matter of fact

[sinserve]

Porn is one thing you don't have to search for, it
will find you.

--

Re:My question is ..

[zoombat]

> Does anyone have any insight into Google's money situation?

The money they save from using a Red Hat linux cluster instead of Windows must be what keeps them afloat.

Re:Google doesn't accept money, but accepts cheate

[ari{Dal}]

so YOU'RE the bastards that have been screwing up my porn searches(@*(@(
um
i mean...
never mind.

And sometimes both!

[MedManDC]

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.