jdMorgan - 9:39 pm on Feb 20, 2004 (gmt 0)

Having been a consultant for a "victim" of forced PFI after an important search provider arbitrarily dropped a client's pages, I'm against it. This was a small bricks-and-mortar, mom-and-pop operation, and they did not have the kind of money needed to pay for all of their pages to be re-included; it was a small, non-e-commerce site. The same goes for expensive directory listings of dubious value -- $299 is nothing to IBM, but a lot to a small business during a recession.

I'm not a conspiracy-nut and this is not a rant, but I did take the dropping of their site, which was clean, useful, and "honestly-optimized" for local visibility, to be a form of blackmail.

By comparison, mom and pop were (and are) much happier with the PPC model available from other providers for the few keyword phrases where their pages were swamped by heavy competition.

Personally, I believe that PPC, presented as "Paid Advertising" with full disclosure is a much more honest approach. It is also manageable for advertisers and profitable for providers. A Pay-Per-Search model is doomed as long as there is one college student left on earth who is willing to code up a search robot and user interface to provide free search -- Ask my daughter if she wants to spend her weekly allowance searching... I don't think so. She's also a minor, and therefore we have the added child-privacy-protection issues with requiring an "account" for search, as well as the fact that daddy will not simply hand her a credit card to use at will.

If no college student can be found, the alternative will be a quick return to the "Jerry's Guide to the Web" model*, and pay-per-search will be relegated to corporate use. There are many ways to stave off the complete and utter commercialization of the Web; Jerry's model could still work, given just a few big directories and a few lower-level specialty directories -- As long as the users don't have to drill down too far, the extra convenience of search over directories may no longer be compelling enough if people are forced to pay for search.

Pay-For-Inclusion - Thumbs down.
Pay-For-Search - BIG thumbs down.

Jim

* Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang's original Web index.