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

This is why Google is better for the obscure

[TrollMan 5000]

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.

Rhetoric is popular

[SirSlud]

>"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?

Google doesn't accept money, but accepts cheaters

[chrysalis]

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.

this is just stupid hysteria

[legLess]

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.

Re:use others?

[redcup]

That's like saying "people still use AOL? why?" Because they don't know better. Think about it - paid placement works because the "average" user doesn't realize it is an ad. These sites aren't targeting the tech-savvy user. We
- research something before we buy it.
- don't trust the media or corporations
- circument ads, tracking technologies, etc.
- look for the best price once we identify what we are buying

And most importantly, for every 10 of us, there are 2 million new internet users who
- click on the first link they see
- believe what the ads have to say
- want to buy from a company name they have heard of (like "AOL" or "MSN")
- think "special offers" are really special (because their mommy said so).

Re:Google rocks!

[Glock27]

's cool, and I love that they run Linux, but honestly, there's no real reason that they couldn't have done this on WinNT. Might take more work, but "googling" is hardly a Linux feature. :-)

Perhaps it could be done with WinNT, but that's not the point.

The point is that Linux is scalable and robust enough to actually do the job. Many would have contested that at one point.

Another point is that the total cost in OS software licenses for 4000+ nodes is $0.00. Let's see Microsoft match that one! ;-)

299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!