For online shoppers, a sorry 'search'

Winning a spot on Overture's and Google's lists of top sites is vital to many e-businesses. Some compare it with gaining shelf space at Wal-Mart or a major supermarket chain.

"A ton of money is flowing into search-engine marketing because users rarely look past the first page of results," says Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, an online trade magazine. The bidding, he adds, yields about $1 billion a year for search engines and their marketing consultants.

Search engines display results in different ways. Many first list sites that have an association to the company that runs the search engine itself. The first results America Online offers, for example, are labeled "recommended sites" and lead to affiliated companies. MSN calls them "featured sites."

Beneath the affiliated sites, most engines list paid placements – such as those bid on by Gary Strat – and label them "sponsored sites." Before the FTC statement, AltaVista labeled paid results "products and services."

AltaVista and Google list sponsored sites both above and to the right of rankings that are not paid for. Google also overlays color bars on sponsored links to emphasize their status as paid advertisements. Unpaid search results, which often run in the millions, are listed last.

But even these are influenced by money. Because of the huge number of websites, search engines lack the resources to inspect the relevance of each. Companies that want their sites included in a search engine's database can, however, pay a fee for the service.

AltaVista charges $70 a year to include a site in its general database. Lycos charges $12. Yahoo!, which relies on human beings rather than software to evaluate and rank sites, promises expedited consideration for $300 a year. Google and Netscape do not offer websites preferential inclusion for a fee.

Until two years ago, search engines relied exclusively on complex algorithms and "crawling" software to find websites and evaluate their relevance to a specific term being searched for. Websites have since found tricks to make their sites appear more attractive to inspection.

Many repeatedly use keywords in their sites' text and programming language. Some persuade other sites to link to their own, thereby making their own sites appear more authoritative.

Other sites go to greater lengths to get noticed. "They create pages loaded with key words that are not even intended for human beings to see," says Sullivan. "As soon as the page appears, it disappears and becomes an e-commerce website."

Search engines will continue to be the recipients of millions in marketing dollars, experts say, because they offer companies a direct link with Internet users interested in their product or service.

Still, consumers can rely on a few safeguards to find objective information online. Most search engines, for example, erase from their indexes sites that have little relevance to specific search terms.

Recognizing consumers' distaste for ads, some research sites, like www.refdesk.com, instead ask users to make a donation via credit card.

If the big search engines tilt too far toward paid results, experts say competitors similar to refdesk.com will fill the void. "I would suspect there would be another search engine with a very simple, very clean, neutral service," says Steve Telleen, a website quality analyst with Giga Information Group.

Page: 1 | 2