Freeserve & ink

back in bed agian

[tigger]

I was just checking out some new bids and came across Inktomi rankings on freeserve and higher than goto, search for door and you'll see what I mean

I have checked some of my (very few) inktomi rankings and they're not showing so I'm a bit unsure as to why freeserve is showning their results, one thought would have been lack of paid listings from goto but this is not the case.

perhaps this is inktomi slowley creaping back into freeserve again

[engine]

Hi Tigger, I was surprised to find alltheweb and lycos being returned in the top ten results of some searches. Have these two services been spidered by Ink??? ;)

[makemetop]

Freeserve has a number of business portals and shopping malls. They use Inktomi to spider these for Freeserve own private DB and will list the results above GoTo listings though they haven't quite worked out how to do it properly yet! These are not standard Inktomi results and will not be seen elsewhere. So you'll find for the word perfume Freeserve's shopping department will be there above the GoTo listing.

This isn't anything new, it is just that they are going to put more and more 'partners' who use their portal services above all other SE listings. A temptation for those who wish to sign up for Freeserve's commercial services!

[tigger]

thanks.

sounds a bit heavy handed to me, makes you wonder if freeserve has employed the services of Don Corlione (bad spelling) to get companies to sign up for their commercial services!

I'll have to search under horses and see what come's in ;)

[engine]

That's just crazy. Imagine this, you pay for an Ink listing and are unlikely to appear in the top results from Freeserve because, ahaead of you is GoTo and ahead of that is Freeserve's shopping mall.
<devils advocate>I'm generalising here, but it sounds to me like Ink is not worth a paid listing.
</devils advocate>

[makemetop]

It certainly isn't worth paying for an Ink listing if you want to be seen on Freeserve. However for AOL UK, HotBot, LineOne, NTL, MSN etc - that's a different story!

[engine]

Absolutely, right on the button. Although, when you consider the share of searches done on freeserve, it's probably relatively high, compared to hotbot.
Much of it comes down to what's on your site. Freeserve is very consumer oriented. If you're a business site, then freeserve is probably not a key portal, whereas hotbot would be.

[tigger]

I must admit being initialy quite an advocate of the paid rankings within ink (mainly because of the Freeserve listings), as the traffic to my own site jumped considerably but this was when the results where being shown on freeserve as well.

when freeserve dropped ink so did my hit's and since i have started paying goto they have returned.

I don't know the importance of inktomi in the uk, when we consider the SE's it provides infomation for, perhaps of the lot MSN being the most important one. The others, well I can't remember the last time I came across UKMAX in my logs.

[makemetop]

For B2B Inktomi is great because a lot of businesses seem to use Inktomi powered portals and then AV, Yahoo, Lycos and Excite but my traffic on Freeserve is awful. For offerings to Joe Public Freeserve and Ask Jeeves through GoTo is brilliant. MSN seems to be 50/50. This seems to be reflected across the board for all types of business. Even if you take terms to attract people to my site where I rank in the top 5 for nearly every possible SEO related phrase on UK GoTo I get maybe 2 visits a day whereas I get 100+ on Inktomi powered engines daily. Even UKMax gives me an average of 1 a day. So a UK based firm of antennae designers will average several enquiries a day from Inktomi and a big fat 0 from Freeserve! Not huge traffic but very focussed and more in a week than they would have previously received in 6 months.