Paid Placements On Search Engines

The most popular and useful tool used by Net surfers today seems to be

available to the highest bidder. Ever since the dot com business model crashed

and Internet advertising budgets were slashed by big companies, pressure has

been building up on search engines to sell top placements in their search

results.

It was unimaginable just about a year ago that companies could buy their

search engine placements. You typed in a key phrase like ‘Indira Gandhi’ and

a list of sites carrying information about Indira Gandhi turned up in search

results.

Now search results can be fixed by paying search engines. The publisher of a

book on Indira Gandhi can pay search engines to put his entry at the top of the

search results. This may not essentially be marked as a sponsored link or an

advertisement.

But it could masquerade as a genuine top listing in search

results.

The power of advertising



Advertisers’ bargaining power have increased in proportion to the decline

in the sustaining power of search engines and other dot coms, helping them grab

top positions.

Today most search engines present paid listings at the top of their search

result pages in a format very similar to that of regular listings. They even let

the position of an advertiser’s listing be dictated by the payments.

You can even buy popular keywords like ‘Aamir Khan’ and the top matches

in the search results for ‘Aamir Khan’ can be links to your company’s home

page. To avoid any ethical and legal problems, all you need to do is put an

Aamir Khan photo on your home page under any silly pretext such as a

congratulatory message for Oscar nomination!

It’s not difficult for India’s Congress Party to buy search keywords like

Atal Behari Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani and covertly insert links to the

Congress Party’s web sites through search engine listings, in response to

these and other similar keywords.

Top companies are offering as high as 10 cents to one dollar for each click

for paid listings on a search engine. This is called a pay-per-click policy and

works in favor of advertisers because what they pay is proportional to the

performance they get out of that link in the listing.

Search outsourced too



Top matches to your search terms can often be the same, on many search

engines like Microsoft Network, Yahoo, America Online or Lycos. That’s because

these top four networks do not operate their own search engines; they employ

services of other search engine companies like Google, Inktomi etc. Many have

been using paid search listings from a company called Overture Services Inc,

which provides the paid listings for different search engines.

Overture is nothing but a successful Internet Ad network. It reported $288

million business last year and announced a healthy profit. Overture has to pay

the search engines to get their advertisers’ listings top placements on the

search results of popular search engines.

Most search engines still attempt to separate their paid listings from their

unbiased search results with different labels, which can, of course be confusing

or even deceptive. Some call their paid links ‘sponsored sites’, some call

them ‘sponsored links’. Some label them ambiguously as ‘partner search

results’. Others don’t even hint that their paid results are paid results,

presenting them under the misleading label ‘search results’.

No money, no go



The most popular search site, Yahoo, has stopped accepting free submissions

to the commercial portion of its directory. Sites that want to be entered into

the ‘Shopping and Services’ or ‘Business to Business’ categories of the

Web directory must now use Yahoo’s $199 ‘Business Express’ service. There

will still be a free submission option for listings in other areas of the

Yahoo.com site or to commercial sections of Yahoo!’s non-US editions.

Commercial sites will soon find it very difficult to get listed without

spending dollars. Even earlier, it was hard to get listed for anyone in Yahoo!.

Now with the new rules of the search engine placement game changing fast, one

may have to probably stop thinking about getting a good placement on Yahoo

totally!

Complain to no avail



Consumer watchdog organizations have promptly complained to the Federal

Trade Commission in the US against this kind of deceptive advertising. But the

case has yet to produce a public response from the FTC. Though the paid listings

may seem to be a temporary response of search engines to get over the

difficulties posed by recession, one never knows how soon they may get converted

to a permanent feature.

Like Yellow Pages, the search engines may soon evolve to be a listing of

commercial subjects. But people at Google, Internet’s top-rated search engine

disagree with this pessimism. Google is trying to sell its own paid listings,

separately, along with regular unbiased search results. It also is trying to

make sure that deceptive paid listings do not appear as a part of a genuine

search results listing.

Users don’t come to search engines for advertising, they come there for

unbiased search results. But the trend towards paid placement may turn out to be

a necessary evil as search engines try to strike a balance between the needs of

free services to users and commercial services.

In the long run, those search engines presenting the most relevant search

results listings and labeling them honestly will remain popular with users. Or,

as the e-mail services like usa.net have done, search engines may one day start

a paid search service sans advertisements, for which users may have to shell out

precious dollars!

Ashok Dongrdongre