robyn_99 - 2:55 am on Aug 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

There's no question that the volume of traffic generated by these "Tier II" and "Tier III" engines is suspect. Google and Overture have locked up distribution across all of the major search engines, so I'm always a little surprised to see Ah-Ha deliver 5x as much traffic as Google does in a given day for the same set of keywords.

Bottomline is that most of these engines are, in fact, syndicating their listings in a variety of places -- pop-ups (mostly forced transfer, evidenced by the fact that users go no deeper than that first page), emails, etc. By and large, it's not search traffic.

Bottomline, tracking each keyword across each engine is the *only* way to ensure the quality of clicks. There's a reason why they clicks go for $.05 - $.10... the key is to find the few that actually work.