Paying search engines to have your site come up higher?

[Draggar]

CNN was reporting this morning that search engines will take money from sites to have their web sites come up higher on a search results list.

They came across this when investigting how they make money (personaly I don't care how they make money).

My question is, would this bother you?

I can see how it would upset some people, either giving inaccurate search results.

But I think that search engine wouldn't put a bad site at the top of a list because they paid money. Personaly, if a search engine gave me bad links at the top of a search constantly, I'd probably stop using it.

Anyone else?

The ones that were named on CNN were Goto.com and google.com.

[korpse]

I personally don't care. They gotta make money somehow...its either that way or with popup ads (like altavista). Its annoying but they provide a good service so i'll look past it.

[Sowulo]

To my knowledge this has been standard practice since day one....

It's part of normal site maintenance for clients if you sell your service as a webmaster....keeping the client's page at the top of the search engines.

It doesn't seem like such a disturbing leap to have the search site itself accept an extra fee for 'special consideration'.

If all this really disturbs you, try reading "Killing Time" by Caleb Carr--talk about the "(mis)Information Age".....

[craigmodius]

I've heard of this and kinda seen it in action too. I feel that it's tolerable so long as it doesn't get out of control.

For instance just let's compare it to banner ads. If I go to a site and there's one to three banner ads I really don't mind, and probably even pay attention to the banner ads that interest me, such as the ones here on WD. But when you go to a site that's all banner ads and pop-up ads, and pop-in ads and other flashing nonsense, you tend to...

1.) Defeat the ads with software, and security settings 2.)Ignore the ads and activate your Tunnel Vision or 3.)Avoid the site entirely .

I think I could live with going to google and having the first 1-3 results of a particular search word or term spit back rigged results, (because google is conservative on the ads to begin with, if not non-existant).

But I don't think they should oversell the ads for a particular search term. And they should be clearly identified as a sponsored link as google does. The moment I search on SQL and get back 20 "sponsored links" is the moment I stop taking that site seriously.

There's no stopping advertising, so someone some day will either Write software that stops rigged results from appearing at all or Create a home PC search engine program that crawls the web at night, and tailors itself to your tastes or even How about a Distributed Computing program search engine that harvests thousands of peoples unused processor cycles to crawl the web and get accurate results for the people in the cluster?

When you make your fortune writing one of the above programs remember me generously