Pay For Prominence In Inktomi, AltaVista and Fast???

[Sharon & Roy]

We just read the this article (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6985191.html?tag=tp_pr) and the following excerpt from it says ...

The rivals have surfaced at a time when the face of Internet search is changing. Many major search services are taking on paid listing models to fuel their results and boost revenues while advertising dollars remain scarce. Inktomi, AltaVista and Fast Search are just a few companies allowing marketers to pay for prominence in search results--a trend that came into vogue with the success of for-fee engine GoTo.com.

Now, our question is, are we reading it wrong, or does Inktomi, AltaVista and Fast Search allow us to pay for prominence? (We are reading that prominence means a boost if not a BIG boost in the rankings.)

We were under the impression that those particular engines would just spider your pages more frequently if you paid to be included, rather than to give your pages prominence, is this not true?

[ihelpyou]

Obviously that is a false statement. Neither myself nor my clients have EVER paid for anything at those engines.

That is how I read that as well. Prominence means a boost. Not true. Actually, I believe that business model has failed miserably for ALL of the engines that are doing it. Ink is not an engine but it has failed. Alta,..... failed. Fast will fail as well.

Google is the one search engine who has it right.

[Advisor]

Originally posted by Sharon & Roy
Now, our question is, are we reading it wrong, or does Inktomi, AltaVista and Fast Search allow us to pay for prominence? (We are reading that prominence means a boost if not a BIG boost in the rankings.)

We were under the impression that those particular engines would just spider your pages more frequently if you paid to be included, rather than to give your pages prominence, is this not true? You absolutlely CAN pay for prominence in AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos and many others. Just take a look at the first results in those engines. All are Pay Per Click listings usually bought through GoTo. Yes, they call them "most popular" or "featured listings" or whatever other fake term they come up with, but you sure do get prominence.

This is different than their paid inclusion programs, which is what you're thinking of. Those just get you in, you still have to work at the prominence, thang.

Jill

[ihelpyou]

yea. They were not specific in what they were talking about. I also immediately thought of those particular engines and not GoTo. Very vague in the report.

[harv]

In the article that Sharon and Roy referred to
this caught my eye

>>For example, Google's 10,000 machines allow the
>>site to provide most search results in a half
>>of a second.

10,000 machines ?

[ihelpyou]

Yep. Google has said that many times. They probably have many more machines now.

[harv]

It's a little off subject but from a curiosity
point of view is there any literature about
the system set up at Google (or any other
search engine) ?

[ihelpyou]

As far as setup and number of servers they use, I have no idea if there is. Did you look all thru the Google site? Don't think that kind of info is there but you never know.

[harv]

>>Did you look all thru the Google site?

I hadn't but I have now, and found
in /All about Google/ Our Technology

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. The speed you experience can be attributed in part to the efficiency of our search algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC's we've networked together to create a superfast search engine.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

I guess that's all they have on their site but I do recall
seeing a mathematical article by Google on their
searching methods so I guess that the information
is around ... somewhere

[JuniorHarris]

You may have already read this:

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (http://www7.scu.edu.au/programme/fullpapers/1921/com1921.htm)

If was written by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

[harv]

JuniorHarris

No I have not seen ths: looks good, thanks