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

[Listera]

Avi wrote:

> Paying for placement is entirely different from paying for inclusion!

One difference is that unless you're included you may never be in the game
and never even get placed.

If you're a search engine, would you spend millions to make your indexing
and coverage better/faster/wider or would you try to perpetuate a situation
that allows you to collect hundreds of millions of dollars due to
(correctable but uncorrected) inefficiencies inherent in your system? Yahoo
may be overly greedy but they are not plainly stupid.

> 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, you think Joe the Average User has the time or the means to verify
this? Especially if he's intentionally kept in the dark about who's reaping
the benefits of the payola and who is not? Did Joe the Average Listener
really understand the ramifications of payola in radio?

Payola is indefensible. The FTC thought so in the 1960s and outlawed it in
the music business [1], and hopefully it will come to its senses on this as
well, sooner than later.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba 

[1] It's of course not been totally uprooted in the music business, which
shows you just how insidious a problem it really is:

<http://dir.salon.com/ent/feature/2001/03/14/payola/index.html>