Re: AltaVista Testing Paid Search Results

From: David Yancey <dyancey_at_intergen.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 3 May 1999 17:26:05 -0500 (CDT)

Note to moderator: Perhaps this thread ought to be retitled
"The Thread That Wouldn't Die"? <g>

Before the readers have a chance to dump all over Joe
Wiseman, let me chime in with support for his honest,
realistic assessment of the role of paid site listings. His
points speak plainly and clearly for themselves, so I won't
rehash them, but we do need to clarify his charge that
smaller sites expect "free" listing services:

While it is legitimate, efficient, and useful to have paid
listings for sites and businesses like his, and for other
sites needing traffic and having the budget to pay for it,
it is also crucial for the continuing growth and flourishing
of the web that all the other sites have alternative listing
venues. These need not be "free", since even the most
anti-market folks surely would agree sites need compensation
in return for their development and maintenance expense. But
if a listings service is ad-supported, it is reasonable for
the listers to expect any listing fee to be, if not zero,
lower than they'd have to pay on a purely fee-supported site
like goto.com.

We also need to emphasize a point Mr. Wiseman did *not* make
specifically: the fact that Alta-Vista is gingerly toying
with a goto-like model, and that Yahoo has found it
necessary to begin migrating toward a "preferential listing
service", in effect, paid listings, tells us that the basic
economics of indexing and/or maintaining a screened
directory are only now being worked out. The question is
not why the engines are seeking revenues in these new ways,
but why it has taken them so long to do so, in the face of
the clearly inadequate performance of, on the one hand,
their search disciplines, and on the other, their "customer
service".

This trend toward operating realism can only bode well for
all of us, for, as Mr. Wiseman says:

"The internet *IS* a business to us. It should be run that
way -- with professionalism and responsibility."

He is right, and all of us should understand that it is the
readiness of businesses to pay for listings, along with all
the other forms of net advertising and more recently,
e-commerce, that is the current *main* source of money to
fuel the continuing expansion of the Internet.

But I hope he'd agree with many of us as well that the more
"search" alternatives, the better, for all parties. It is
vital that business professionals realize that for every
site that can afford to purchase a listing in the web's
emerging family of "yellow pages" services, many hundreds
simply cannot. If we want to encourage this wonderful
medium and tool, ways must be found to accommodate and
encourage access to all the other sites of merit, the "white
pages" folks, so to speak. The phone charges paid mainly by
businesses have subsidized such "free" listings for many
decades, *not* because businesses are altruistic, but
because a *wider telephone user community is economically
good for any business that pays for a "yellow page"
listing*. It seems reasonable that a similar model can work
on the web.

Note, please, that I do *not* say that these alternatives
need to be free, or uneconomic, or unprofessional, or even
unbusinesslike. But they should, IMHO, be beyond the
influence of an advertiser. They should show results based
on search criteria, not on who could pay the most to get the
higher slots. Mr. Wiseman himself supports this very view
himself, with every dollar of his that goes to some Public
Library where *all* books are accessible, not just the
blockbusters and porno magazines.

So, as Mark Montgomery says: "...what we really need is
product differentiation and a diverse choice."

Meaning that the really interesting and compelling question
to some of us is how to construct an engine that performs
logically, quickly, reliably, and predictably using the
search arguments, and then, how to persuade the "market" of
users to pay for it fairly. Until and unless this is done,
we the vast net community will simply leave the field open
to a succession of copy-cat paid listings services and their
large corporate clients, and many, many thousands of worthy
and useful sites will remain relatively undiscovered, their
pages unseen, and pageviews uncounted.

David Yancey - Managing Director, Intergen Associates
Internet Business Planning, Development & Management

"If you want an Internet presence, create a website; if you
want
an Internet *business*, create an Internet Business Plan."
mailto:dyancey_at_intergen.co.uk
or call our office in Japan at 81-42-943-2637


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Received on Mon May 03 1999 - 20:25:07 CDT