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a Search Engine Watch survey shows that some meta search services are providing results where more than half of their listings are paid links.
I suspect so, and I'd be willing to bet, that with the way things have been developing in the last 6 months, top positions at virtually ever SE will be paid for.
I agree most would not know whether they are paid listings or not, but see no hard evidence either way that people are finding paid listings more useful. I would tend to feel that paid listings are less useful, unless you are searching the Web for ways to spend money! Not being smart, that is a legitimate use of the Web (shopping for products and services), but people who use the Web for research purposes, must at least be a substantial proportion.
Generally, you will not be high on paid listings if you are not delivering a good sales pitch on the site. For example the only Go To listings we have are to a few pages which sells things very directly. We do not have Go To links to pages on the 99% of our pages which just provide objective, non-sales oriented information that is actually far more useful than our "advert pages". So people using "paid" indexes will see our commercial piches and advertising, and people using unpaid indexes like Google see our more informative content, but can still click though to "sales pages" once our content has qualified them as a good prospect.
So my vote to your question is no, I dont think the fact that the meta search engines which provide the greatest amount of paid listings are "more useful". They are just more commercial themselves (like DogPile) and need to make money back quick. IXQuick with one of the lowest proportions of paid listings is less commercial and less well known. The only thing Ixquick they have going for them is a particularly good algorithm that consistently returns the best results for me at least.
Having said that, I'm not an "internet should be free" whacko. I do see the time coming where listings needs to be paid for - but at a smaller cost per listing. These should come down as paying for indexing becomes more widespread, based on the economics of cost per units coming down the more units you have.
At present, paying for listing results in almost exclusively commercial sites coming up on top of these listings - making searching them extremely frustrating for people who are just looking for information. Additionally i am seeing daily on GoTo for example that higher bidders of generalist sites are able to outbid smaller bidders of pages that provide more specific information - I suspect that GoTo has relaxed their relevance criteria and that just about anything that mentions a term once is approved - depite that page maybe having 20 or more other targeted keywords possible for that page.
But I see a day when relevancy of SERPS improves industry wide by the acceptance that web publishers should contribute a small reasonable amount to be indexed, with a better pricing model that more accurately reflects the "value" of a click.
At the present top listings on GoTo for example are just not cost effective for information, news, not for profit, some governments, hobbyist sites which nevetheless provide credible information, and the like. For example the day when banner revenue alone would pay back from the cost of Go To clicks, in general is far behind us.
Still without wanting to sound off my old horn yet again, I still see the new environment of Se's directories, and "finding things on the Net" in the future, being dominated more by specialised professional Se's/indexes, "vortals?" than we have before. The increasing domination of paid for listings in SERPS overall is a sign that the era of the mega broad based search engine, like the broad portal, is reaching it's nemesis.
Those who remember the basic architecture of the Internet will know it was designed primarily for miltary communication purposes so that if one line was taken out, the rest of the internet, with multiple connections, would not be taken out of a whole. At essence, therefore, the Web is best suited for niche marketing and information delivery, rather than mass marketing. That is the key mistake that many Net entrepreneurs made. The Internet is a new marketing medium which needs to be treated as such.
*** END OF RANT ***
They probably are clueless about that, but I still think that the PPCs, unfortunately, return better results in the commercial, E-retail world, than the robots who crawl our pages of the likes of Alta Vista and many others.
Eventually the PPCs will win because people, whether they are conscious (oh my spelling !!) of it or not, will recognize that fact after some experience and go to what gets them good results -- the PPCs.
Some of the mega search engines that use multiple PPCs do make a point of stating that the site listed is a bidded site, and some even list the price per click.
Not quite sure why they do that (anybody have an opinion on why they do that?, would love to hear it !!) --
I'd like to think it would be to discourage the casual surfer from costing the bidder a useless click through. But that's probably just naive.
By the Way: For those who haven't seen it yet here's the latest comparison from Search Engine Watch on Yahoo!'s effectiveness and GoTo.com's as rated by (I think) buyers of paid-for listings (buyers for PPC listings):
[searchenginewatch.com...]
94 people ain't a lot from which to make such a judgement, but it tells a tale, or the beginning of one: I think it supports the point that, sooner or later, all the search engines will require payment for top positions or just important positions (top 20?).
If you are a searcher on the web and looking to buy, the PPC results get you quicker, better results than the tradional SEs, except for Yahoo! and maybe Google, at least that has been my experience when compared to my old favorite AltaVista, Lycos, and that yuk MSN Search, or AOL, Netscape, Looksmart, and the ODP, which really sucks in comparison to all of them.
One reason is: as a seller website you can get listed for so many different relevant terms and show up, if you pay for them on PPCs, where you would never show on Alta Vista, etc at all for the same terms, though they are relevant to the searcher and you, the seller.
Now GoTo and FindWhat have bought their way into the majors for all those terms that would otherwise return "no results found for your search" or worse -- a listing of 3 or 4 sites that have nothing to do with those terms. That's what would normally have shown on AOL, Netscape, MSN, Direct Hit, Excite, Alta Vista, Lycos, HotBot six months ago before they allowed Goto and FindWhat in.
Now, instead, on all those sites for those terms you are there if you are among the top 3 bidders for those terms, or in the case of AltaVista, even among the top 5 or 6 bidders.
Anyone really think that this won't expand to us having to buy on each SE into the top 10 or 20? Whether you buy from Goto or the SE itself?
END OF WORRY AND RANT
It does tend to decrease the relevancy however for mainstream searches, where people are looking for information in general. That's one problem with AV featuring GoTo listings at the top without attributon that these are PPC listings. Click on these and almost always you will get commercial pitches with little on going links. Makes for a very poor search experience unless you want to buy something.
In the best world of course, you would have one SE for shopping, one for research, one for education/kids, one for entertainment etc. etc. But that's all theory of course. At present Se's use of PPC data is demonstrating that it is very hard to keep surviving without getting paid for clicks.
Generally webmasters whose sites are primarily informational or the like cannot afford the cost of GoTo for example, but I think the only way for their sites to have good exposure in the long run and the industry to settle, is for all webmasters getting used to paying, if just a small amount, for indexing.
