Paying for listing with search results
No matter what the Internet file-swappers say, information isn't free. Consider the article you're now reading. Most of the cost of producing it -- and the rest of the Globe, in print or online -- is borne by advertisers, who pay plenty for a chance to sell you their products.
But that doesn't mean that the Globe lets those advertisers tell us which stories to print. That'd be unethical. Yes, it happens now and then, usually at smaller papers that fear the loss of a major ad account. But any major paper that tailored its editorial policy to suit its advertisers would soon lose its readers' trust.
Which brings us to the Internet search engine business. Last week, one of the biggest, Yahoo, said it's expanding a system that lets companies pay for listings on its Web page index.
Most of the listings on search engines, including Yahoo, are generated by the company's own indexing programs, or ''spiders." But Yahoo and some other services supplement this by allowing major websites to add their content directly to the index, a practice called ''paid inclusion."
This is different from the ads that appear along the edges of some search engines, and are clearly marked as ads. With paid inclusion, a company's Web link appears in the main search results area, mixed in with all the other links. A site that uses paid inclusion gives the search engine a few cents whenever a user clicks on one of its links. The website gets more traffic; the search engine gets fees.
But do Internet searchers get good, accurate information? Or are the results of the search skewed to favor those who've paid to be in the index? The jury's out on that one.
''What you have here is a really nasty mixture of fuzzy ethics . . . and commerce," said Susan Feldman, a search engine researcher at International Data Corp. in Framingham. ''Nobody really knows what's right." It's easy to imagine a company paying to stuff the Yahoo index with solid, reliable information -- all designed to sell its products, but still useful. But it's just as easy to suppose that someone might pay to stuff the index with useless drivel -- the Web equivalent of spam.
This won't happen at Yahoo, said Tim Cadogan, Yahoo's vice president of search. For one thing, paid inclusion sites are reviewed by human beings who judge their probable value to Web surfers. ''If you pay, it has no input to where you're ranked," Cadogan said. A page full of irrelevant material will get a low rating and usually won't appear in the search results, whether the page's owner pays or not. That's why a Yahoo search doesn't identify which results were supplied by a company that paid for the privilege -- according to Cadogan, it doesn't matter.
Maybe. But another search service, Ask Jeeves, dropped a similar program last week, declaring that it did matter. Jim Lanzone, Ask Jeeves' vice president of product management, told CNet.com that searchers found themselves getting fewer useful websites per search. The results were diluted by less valuable Web pages whose owners had paid to get them in.
Despite this sobering experience, Ask Jeeves still takes money from firms wanting a spot in its index. The difference is that Ask Jeeves now won't promise to list these sites. It's the same as the Yahoo approach: They'll take your money, but with no guarantee that searchers will ever see your site.
There's something fishy here, and Larry Page, cofounder of Google, the world's most popular search engine, puts his finger on it. ''If you're going to charge money for something, you've got to provide value for it," Page said. ''If you say you're going to charge people, and you're not going to change the rankings, why are they going to pay?"
Yahoo's Cadogan insists that paid inclusion is ''a service. It's not advertising," a thin, implausible distinction. After all, what service is Yahoo providing, except access to its user's eyeballs? Businesses that buy advertising expect results. That's why Page thinks search sites that offer paid inclusion will have to start skewing their results to favor advertisers, or those advertisers will realize they're paying for nothing and put away their wallets.
It's a conundrum Google handily avoids by refusing to touch paid inclusion with a barge pole. ''I think it's a very important thing for people to be able to trust us," Page said. Nobly said, but Page can afford to be noble about it; Google has about 150,000 clients for its clearly marked ads, making it the Internet's most successful advertising venue.
In fairness to the paid inclusion companies, they have nothing to gain by serving up unreliable searches, no matter how much they're paid to do so. It's possible to combine trustworthy information and profitable advertisements in the same medium. And advertisements are exactly what these paid listings are. They should be marked as such, so Web surfers know where they stand. After all, it works for newspapers.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
