dwedeking - 3:08 pm on Jul 18, 2001 (gmt 0)

I think (prequalifing my post :) ) that in the end the listings will fall somewhere between Curious and Napoleon. Search Engines need money to keep the lights on and to buy Curious his car so they will have paid listings, the will probably be labled somehow (Alta Vista and Looksmart said theirs were labeled [a pr move] meaning that the search engines realize that with public out cry/education they will need to be marked separate). While the Net is getting more expensive for the Mom and Pop sites to get their piece, it is still more price effective than offline advertising. The problem for the end user that I see in PPC is that the listings will become similiar across the search engines. Course this will lead to the #3 search engine promoting the fact that they don't have paid listings and are different than all the others (ain't competition great!). My $.02