Do Search Engines Tell the Truth?
SAN FRANCISCO — Some online search engines are yielding results that are less than you expect. The most prominent findings may surface not because they’re the best fit, but because the subjects wrote the biggest checks to the search engine providers, industry participants acknowledge. So-called paid inclusion and paid placement are reality in some form at most of the big-name search engines, say many speakers at the Search Engine Strategies conference here recently. The event was sponsored by Internet.com. It’s simply a matter of firms seeking revenue other than banners and other forms of online advertising, say representatives of search engine firms. Under paid inclusion, a Web site pays the engine to “crawl” the site’s pages and include them in the index the engine uses to generate its search results. With paid placement, the Web site pays to place links to its pages near the top of relevant search results. Such practices are widely acknowledged but typically not publicized, confere
