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Thursday, 27th February 2003

90383407

Web Search
Source: The Washington Post
Cherchez The Search Advantage
A couple of comments about Leslie Walker's article. She writes, "Another kind of search revenue also is growing fast. Called "paid inclusion," it allows advertisers to pay to make sure their Web pages are included in the automated programs that crawl the Web's links and index its pages. The Web has grown so big that search engines have difficulty scanning all of it. So most of them -- Google is the main exception -- let companies pay to ensure they are included in what is scanned. Sponsored results, by contrast, do more than ensure a listing, they guarantee greater visibility through higher placement in the results."
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O.K. let's review. Paid inclusion has been around for a couple of years. Inktomi got the ball rolling in March of 2001. However, paid inclusion DOES NOT mean that content that is NOT PAID for isn't in the index. Most of the content in AllTheWeb, Teoma, MSN Search, and AltaVista is not paid inclusion. The companies that do pay are guaranteeing that the crawler indexes and reindexes the material quickly. In most cases, organizations pay for paid inclusion per url. In the past few months were seeing more and more rapid recrawling of all material paid inclusion or not by all of the engines. Is it where it needs to be, not at all. But it's getting better. Walker also makes "sponsored results" seem a bit decevious. This is not true. In this case, results are clearly labeled sponsored (the labeling is much better than in the past) and appear either at the top of the result listings or in the right-hand column. These sponsored listings do NOT influence the actual search results. Finally, the size of the web does continue to grow but this is not the only reason why material might not be indexed. Furthermore, even if it WERE in one place, how easy would it be to access ANY of it without the proper tools to get it out of the database and utilize the data. In other words, specialized engines designed around a specific data set will still be useful. The challenge (and it's a big one, is knowing what's available and being able to get to it quickly. Great information professionals have always understood the tools they had to work with. No different here.

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