Before you could not buy your way to the top of a search engine. In 2000 a company called GoTo.com, looking for a different revenue model, started to sell placement in its search engine. It signed deals with Netscape Search and AOL Search and other deals soon followed. By the end of 2001 - in just one year - every major search engine had paid listings of some type prominently included in its search results. Initially, this was chastised by search engine purists who argued that paid entries were corrupting the relevancy ranking that researchers rely on for evaluating websites. At the time, GoTo's CEO said that their service is like a glorified yellow pages, allowing those with money to pay for bigger positioning.
This was all before the dot-com crash. GoTo, now Overture, is no longer seen as a pariah, but as a trailblazer. Now paid placement in search tools is a common practice, although it is one you may not know about. It is so widespread that, at a mid-2001 conference run by Search Engine Watch editor Danny Sullivan, the vast majority of the companies presenting their technologies were firms specializing in getting listings put into search engines, a field they dub "search engine optimization." Those people who viewed placement as a violation of the spirit of search engines were a tiny minority amid a wave of placement proponents.
Ads are so important that search giant Google has noted that since 2001 about 95 percent of its revenue comes from online advertisements that appear next to search results - in paid placements. Paid Placement and Paid Inclusion - How They Work There are two different ways that search engines sell positioning in their results, according to Danny Sullivan, an expert on search engine optimization. Most search engines carry what are called "paid placement" listings, where advertisers are guaranteed a high ranking, usually in relation to desired keywords. Usually, these paid listings are separated from the editorial results and labeled to highlight they are ads. They are most often called "sponsored" results. Where they appear on the page depends on the different search tools.
The major search engines stress that paid inclusion does not mean any ranking boost at all. They say the paid inclusion program simply helps a new website get listed quicker, or helps the search engines find pages it might ordinarily not index. Search engines insist that page rank results depend on the algorithms and other factors that they have always used to rank web sites. Sullivan stresses, "It's important to remember that while search engines say that paid inclusion provides no ranking boost, there is no way for the general public to easily verify this."
As a result of a push by the U.S. government to get sponsored results designated clearly, a dramatic change has occurred on how both search engine and meta-search tools designate their results. For example, Google clearly displays a "sponsored links" banner to denote where paid listings are. Yahoo! lists paid listings visibly under the headline "sponsored results," AltaVista calls them "sponsored matches," and Teoma calls them "sponsored links." Each of these major search engines clearly designate them so you can see that they are different from the regular search results. In contrast, some the meta-search services are not as direct and upfront about such delineation, making it harder to tell which links are paid for and which are not.
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