[Sigia-l] RE: "Best Bets" the Yahoo way

[Avi Rappoport]

Paying for placement is entirely different from paying for inclusion!

I'm not a huge fan of paid placement, though I like the way Overture 
used to say exactly how much was paid for each clickthrough, as the 
transparency was very reassuring.  Now they just say   (sponsored 
listing)    I'm sure because people were gaming the placement 
auctions.

Paid-included pages which are reviewed are known to be current and 
not spam - that in and of itself will get them a preferred placement 
above suspicious pages, as it should. But it's only one of a number 
of factors, including the site being listed in the Yahoo directory or 
ODC, type of content, location of the match words and the number and 
type of incoming links.   And remember, this is because the basic 
TF/IDF or other relevance ranking systems can't possibly distinguish 
among the quality of hits when you get 19 million on Yahoo for 
travel new york.

So paid inclusion is not necessarily a bad thing.  It's all in the 
implementation.  I'm not saying "blindly trust the search engines," 
more like "trust and verify."

Avi

At 4:21 PM +0000 3/11/04, CD Evans wrote:
>There's a 'great great great' book on paying to be seen on the web called:
>
>Preferred Placement: Knowledge Politics on the Web
>Edited by Richard Rogers
>
>http://www.janvaneyck.nl/publications/pubinf/rogers.html
>
>- reviewed by David Brake here:
>http://www.mindjack.com/books/placement.html
>
><snip>
>Preferred placement turns the tables on web analysis to date. 
>Instead of celebrating the web and all its prospects for creative 
>artistry, democracy and e-commerce, the volume authors calmly go 
>backstage. How are search engines, portals, default settings and 
>collaborative filtering formatting the surfer and offering passage 
>to the media? A colourful spectrum of thinkers queries the medium's 
>preferencing and recommendation mechanisms with an eye towards 
>articulating, and learning from, the new politics of knowledge on 
>the web.
></snip>
>
>CD Evans
>
>
>On 4 Mar 2004, at 17:01, sigia-l-request at asis.org wrote:
>
>>Paying for inclusion, or paying for
>>index frequency, etc., are not unreasonable and may decrease the reliance on
>>advertising.
>
>>Jonathan Bieley
>>MapleStar Consulting
>
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-- 
   Avi Rappoport, Search Engine Consultant <mailto:avirr at searchtools.com> 
   Complete Guide to Search Engines for Web Sites and Intranets
             <http://www.searchtools.com>