[log in to unmask] "there's a good name in there somewhere" writes:

> You can thank the jerks who misuse the system for spam or fraudulent pages
>  for the current state of this mess. No matter what you do to get high index
>  rankings, some search engine somewhere sometime will probably decide you
are
>  doing it fraudulently promote a page as something it is not. Then they will
>  downgrade the page and you are back to were you started.

Actually, I don't condemn the "jerks" for taking advantage of the economic
opportunities that present themselves in the way that search engines rank
their returns. And apparently neither does Bill Gross, the founder of
GoTo.com.

Bill is in the business of really screwing with the search engines, skewing
the results so that the first several to several dozen returns go to the
highest bidders, the people who have paid the most money to GoTo.com, not to
the most relevant "hits." GoTo calls these "sponsored" links -- and
surprisingly, in an era when no one else can figure out a way to make money
off of the internet, he's making money off of this scheme, which only means
that it's going to spread like wildfire.

He's not only doing this with his own search engine, but he's now selling
these "sponsored" responses to the other major search engines, including
Yahoo, AOL, Northern Light, etc., and passing along 2/3's of the revenue he
takes in to these ultimate presenters.

Some of the end-consumer search engines are honest enough to give some
indication that the top several returns are being paid for, and some even
list the bid price for each of the listings, but some engines are giving you
no clue as to how things are being ordered.

Of perhaps greatest interest, Bill Gross recently said in defense of this
scheme that if he wanted product information, he'd go to GoTo.com. But he
also added that if he wanted information, he'd go to Google, so far the only
search engine that hasn't been corrupted in any way by this procedure.

A bit more explanation can be found at:

http://www.redherring.com/index.asp?layout=story&channel=70000007&doc_id=64001

6664

(watch the wrap)

Wirt Atmar

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