Tag: listings

The Difference between Paid and Organic Listings

As a business sector, the world of search is changing. Last week I wrote a piece about how Google has less decision making power than users might think as the company finds itself in a business environment that is being molded by factors outside their corporate control. The bottom line in any enterprise, regardless of the social mission associated with that enterprise is survival. In the business world, survival necessitates making money. Saying one needs to make money is a lot easier than actually making that money. Being a leader in any field does not necessarily equate to turning a profit as evidenced by the dead or dying brands Lycos, Alta Vista and Infoseek. Each of these search tools provided their users with good, relevant information but none of them could survive on their own. Each has been gobbled up by a bigger player and eventually killed or put on the “death-watch” list.

The Problem with Site MatchTM : Creeping Commercialism Infiltrates Pure Search Listings

For over a year now, Yahoo has spent a lot of money acquiring assets that will allow them to grab market share from Google. They bought Inktomi, which is feeding search results to the Microsoft network, and they bought Alltheweb, and AltaVista, and Overture. Last month they unveiled plans that will integrate these assets. The most controversial of these is Site Match, which involves embedding paid links into the main index. There has been very little comment about Site Match from the noncommercial sector. Almost all of the grassroots discussion revolves around whether the typical ecommerce webmaster can benefit from the Site Match model, or whether he would be better advised to rely on free crawling and indexing. The commentary from the pundits is even more shallow, and discusses whether Yahoo has the right stuff to crush Google. This article, on the other hand, looks at Site Match from the perspective of a nonprofit webmaster.

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