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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."
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'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.
> 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"
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.
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
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.
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!
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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.
A car company could buy up enough ad space through fake companies so that reports on how its SUV tips over at 10 MPH are buried in the "search results."
And you, as the customer, have no rights to demand that the search engine reveal whether or not it is allowing this or maintaining a strict division between sponsored or objective search results (for my purposes, I use the term "objective" to mean that the search engine algorithm is not weighted towards advertising dollars).
While it is a customer's responsibility to do his research, it is also a business' responsibility to be honest. Caveat emptor has been used to permit all sorts of business actions that we today view as "crimes." I don't hear anyone complaining about a law when its enforcement "protects" someone from a "criminal." Why promote a corporate right to lie? What purpose is served by doing that?
I'm not saying that every kind of enforcement is possible, but that at least if a society requires businesses to behave honestly, they protect society's right to penalize a dishonestly run business when they catch one. There is no "invisible hand" of the free market, that is, a guiding force that exists outside of the market players; those with the most clout (money) get to manipulate the market more than anyone else. If they get to manipulate the very information on which the market depends, it ain't free no more.
As to Google, I like it not only because of clearly marked ads, but also because of the damn well working matching.
An interesting sidenote is that matching also seems to be dynamically adjusted based on hits (ie. times user clicks on particular search result). I noticed that for one of my "own" pages, which went from number 8 to number 1 in a week (took a month for Google to find the page, but only a week to upgrade it... the page gets 90% of hits via Google actually). It's not a huge amount of hits (5-10 a day), but I think search matching works well (page contains a piece of open source code in a popular programming language, so it's reasonably easy to "guess" correct keywords; but it seems that there aren't all that many real alternatives, even though result set has ~7000 pages)... and that's not because it's my page and I want tons of hits but because it seems like a perfect match, compared to most other results returned (like I was objective observer here... :-) ).
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
"...if you use Google to search for a specific consumer product, you'll get mostly garbage."
Actually, you're a liar. I just searced on Google for three random consumer goods: Goldfish Crackers, Honda Accord, and Dell Computer. The first site brought up in all three cases was the web site for the product on the producing company's web site.
Stop proffering your biased nonsense as fact, and your consumer harm as benefit. Perhaps you've never read "Unsafe at Any Speed" but maybe you should, and quit pawning off modern-day Pintos.