Brett_Tabke - 8:07 am on Jul 17, 2001 (gmt 0)

A link to the complaint and comments:

[commercialalert.org...]

Thank you to Gary Ruskin and Commercial Alert for taking this action and raising awareness of the issue with the general public.

Over the last year, I have been astounded at the unrestrained crass actions of the search engines. Just yesterday in a private message on this board:

Goto showing up everywhere and mostly unacknowledged advertising. Ink charging outrageous prices for simple spidering. Altavista doing same, but price gouging for the same (imho). AllTheWeb/Lycos headed for paid spidering. Excite, NorthernLight - no traffic in the foreseeable future. Google - the mass dominant search engine on the web - unrestrained and unchallenged mass copyright violations. What we are seeing is what amounts to a monopoly of 6. They can do basically anything they want now. They maintain the monopoly by discouraging competition. By our (WebmasterWorld) discouraging new search engines (aka : Teoma, Wisenut, ViscaOnline), we have been helping them to maintain that monopoly. We need all the competition in the search engine business we can find. It will help get the above engines back in line and once again accountable for there actions. I think it is time to back away from roasting the new engines, and instead embrace them. Granted, there is still a line to be drawn. Such as ViscaOnline it is pretty clear that it is probably headed for ppc land - however, WiseNut and Teoma stand to become real players. Lets see what we can do to support their growth in a legitimate manner.

The biggest problem in the last year in SEO has been the number of 'experts' who have been doing the search engines bidding in public. There have always been a few high profile people who've jumped when the se's said jump, but that has grown dramatically in the last year.