SAN FRANCISCO -- Google, Lycos, Yahoo, HotBot and AltaVista are the first five sites you get back if you type "search engine" into Google. Now, that's a rather predictable result: These are the engines that everyone has heard of. They're old, established, mostly pretty good, and they're very popular.
But that's not the whole story of search. Scan down the Google results and you'll notice that mixed in with search engines that are popular -- such as Excite or AskJeeves -- there are a few that have funny names and are less than well-known. There's one called Dogpile that promises "all results, no mess." Another is Ah-Ha, which only returns "the good stuff."
Ordinarily, this might not sound like a big deal -- there are unheard-of companies all over the Web. But what's weird is that here at the Search Engine Strategies Conference, everybody seems to be talking about these obscure engines. People are suggesting that it's somehow a big deal to get your site listed on one of these engines. Indeed, there is a business here whose sole purpose is to get your site listed on a site like Dogpile, provided you are willing to pay for it.
Welcome to the red-light district of the search world -- the place where you pay to be on top. Search engines like Dogpile, Ah-Ha and half-a-dozen others in the expo hall are in a business that people here elegantly refer to as "CPC searching." That is, "cost per click," in which a site owner bids on a particular search term -- say, "search engine" -- and gets listed according to how much he pays for it.
For example, search for "search engine" at Ah-Ha and instead of Google listed first, you get Super Promote, which is a site that promises "maximum exposure for your website."
Each time somebody clicks on that top listing, Super Promote will pay Ah-Ha 30 cents. The next site listed, GSEP.com, pays 29 cents for its spot. The third site pays only 13 cents.
This isn't a completely new phenomenon in the search world. Go-To.com has been offering this service for a while, and all of the biggest search engines offer "sponsored links," in which site owners can pay to have their sites prominently displayed.
In fact, these big engines have sometime been less-than-candid about their own listings. Earlier this year, a few of the big search engines -- including Lycos, which is owned by TerraLycos, the corporate parent of Wired News -- were even cited by consumer groups as being secretive about paid listings. (The sites denied accusations that they were being dishonest.)
But while the big engines may feature paid listings in addition to unpaid listings, the CPC engines at the conference put a premium on the paid listings and they defend their practices by saying that, in the end, this is really what consumers want.
Tony Smith, a representative of a new CPC engine called SearchBoss, said that results offered on his site are "more relevant than a lot of results being offered by sites that use spiders." ("Spiders" are the tools used by most search engines to index the Web.)
He insists that "companies that are paying to be there are going to want to be relevant, because they have to pay each time somebody clicks on their site."
This is the same argument that all of the CPC engines make when proselytizing their services. The market takes care of the relevancy, they say: If a company is paying for a keyword that isn't relevant to its business, it'll get a lot of clicks to its site that aren't "converted" to purchases and it'll find that it's losing money.
Consequently, it will adjust its bid (or perhaps bid on other, more relevant keywords) until it starts seeing some money coming in. In the end, customers benefit, because certain keywords become associated with sites that are most relevant.
But what if a site buys up the most popular search terms, even if those terms aren't necessarily related to the site? For example, what if Coca-Cola wants to pay a truckload for "Britney Spears," even though it's unlikely that someone searching for "Britney Spears" is looking for Coke? (And even though it's more likely that Britney fans are Pepsi drinkers.)
Smith said that such a situation is unlikely, because "businesses aren't looking for just eyeballs anymore."
But just to make sure that companies aren't bidding on keywords that don't match their services, SearchBoss and the other CPC companies all said they employ people to look the orders over to make sure things are relevant.
Robert Barnes, an executive at Ah-Ha, cautioned against applying too rigid a definition to the word "relevant." If someone is selling Britney Spears T-shirts, even if it's not the main part of their business, why shouldn't they have top billing when someone searches for "Britney Spears"?
"It all depends on what people are looking for," he said. And it's possible that some people are looking for Britney T-shirts when they search for Britney, and not her official site, which is what Google lists first. And if they are, a CPC engine will appeal to them.
Of course, the biggest problem with these types of engines is that they commercialize the last bastion of honesty on the Web; they make searching, which was considered a kind of technological pursuit, just another expression of capitalism.
But who are we kidding, anyway -- everything on the Web is about money.
