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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!
people still use search engines that arent google? hmm...
why?
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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?
> 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"
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
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.
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
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!
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
That's from a very cool recent interview with him from CNN.
>"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"
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}}
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
> 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.
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.
That's what we need! More laws!
Laws passed where? Your local city council? County legislation? State? Federal? Global? Enforcable how?
We don't need laws. We don't need regulations. We don't need to chase down unscrupulous "search engine" providers who muck with their results to prefer their sponsors.
The 'Net is a funny thing... since it's SO easy to get from one search engine to another (as opposed to say, only being able to buy milk at the one supermarket in town), people will naturally migrate towards the one that suits them best. That might be something like Google that tends NOT to preference their sponsors, or something like Yahoo that does. But we certainly don't need laws to "protect" the surfing public.
Caveat emptor.
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
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
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."
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 :)
:-))
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
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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.
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GOOGLE
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Save money! Don't Buy It
Before You PriceSCAN It!
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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
That's not "guaranteed placement in search results", though. Google's query-based advertising is distinct from the list of search results.
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.
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.
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!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
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)