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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."
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?
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
That's from a very cool recent interview with him from CNN.
They make money from paid ads but they have them in a clearly marked section away from the non-paid listings. Also they make a good amount of money setting up their search engine on corporate intranets or for searches within a particular website.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Products placement and banner ads aren't the samething at all. When you see a banner on a website, you know that's a banner, that someone has paid for it.
But, when Yahoo|Terra Lycos|MSN|AOL|Inktomi|Alta Vista put in a search result link to websites that that have paid to be listed first, you don't know if it's a "real" result, or if someone has paid to put it their.
If they put these "sponsored links" like Google does it, it'll be a "clean" way to make advertisment (and money). That's one of the reason why Google is so popular.
> 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.
the moment Google takes money to place listing on the top of the search results(not on the side) is the moment it becomes just like every other engine.
Why do you think those engines aren't any damn good? because the returns are becomeinf less and less relevent.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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
If you search for something that is in their directory, results are from their own databases first. If they run out of results, they go to google next.
1. Try searching for "pogo sticks" on yahoo.
2. Note the url.
3. Scroll down and hit the next button.
4. Repeat until you see google.yahoo.com
Note, they put sponsored links above it. That and after seeing the last page of results (in this case, the 1st page is the last), it lets you use google.
Proof that they don't alaways use google, search for "cars". You'll get a bunch of their directory links and sponsored links.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I just work there as a sysadmin, I didn't know they were spamming when I got hired. They also don't support free software although they heavily use it. I was fixing a bug in Ticketsmith (a GPL'd ticket tracking system) when the CEO said 'Hey, no. Don't fix that if "they" didn't fix it. We are not there to loose time to work for "them"' .
Porn sites make a lot of money. But watching porn movies all the day probably destroys their mind.
{{.sig}}
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 :)
:-))
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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
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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
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.
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
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}}
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)
But, when Yahoo|Terra Lycos|MSN|AOL|Inktomi|Alta Vista put in a search result link to websites that that have paid to be listed first, you don't know if it's a "real" result, or if someone has paid to put it their.
Actually, you do. If you visit any of the sites you mentioned you will see that the "sponsored" links are set apart and labelled differently from the rest of the search results. And, *gasp*, they have a link that explains that these are sponsored results.
If you're really concerned, visit the source of all those evil, and relevant, sponsored results and you can see how much each advertiser is paying per click. Then, you can scroll down to the free listings and use those.
Seriously people, why would someone *pay* to direct traffic to their business web site if it wasn't traffic that's going to spend money?