Search Engine Optimisation, Promotion and Internet Marketing

Paid inclusion under fire at search engine conference

4 March 2004

The issue of paid search inclusion in web indexes was a hot topic of debate during the Jupitermedia's Search Engine Strategies 2004 conference in New York.

Yahoo recently announced that it would be including paid sites within its general search results, while Google Inc is set firmly against any combination of paid search results with its web index. Ask Jeeves has announced that it is dropping the Index Express paid program from its direct XML index, while retaining another paid service for web crawling.

The search engine battle is heating up after Yahoo switched from Google's search results to its own technology last month and Microsoft Corp announced that it is developing its own search technology.

Paul Gardi, Ask Jeeves senior vice president of operations and planning, said the company dropped the Index Express service because it did not return relevant results for users.

"It really is critical if you put information in the index that it is found in a relevant way," he said. "That method of paid submission was not meeting that requirement."

During a panel debate at the conference, Google director of technology, Craig Silverstein, insisted that the company will continue to ban any paid inclusion into its Web search index. "It's hard to be sure that the end result of the algorithm would be the same and that everyone is being treated fairly," he explained.

Yahoo's vice president of Web search, Tim Cadogan, stressed that the company's commercial relationships with paid inclusion customers will not influence its search results.

Paid inclusion allows advertisers to pay fees to have large numbers of Web addresses indexed more regularly in search engines.

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