Slashdot Mirror
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."
people still use search engines that arent google? hmm...
why?
-
> 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"
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.
That's from a very cool recent interview with him from CNN.
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.
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}}
> 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 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
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.
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}}