The other major form of search engine advertising under the FTC review is so-called paid inclusion. Although this practice is less well known than paid placement among search engine users, it is no less popular among marketers and may raise more troubling questions when it comes to sorting out its effects on actual search results. "Paid inclusion gets more complicated because the deals vary a lot," said Dean Forbes, an attorney with the FTC's division of advertising practices. "If all of the sites in the search engine's results were paid inclusion then that should be disclosed because that makes it an ad medium," he said. Paid inclusion largely pertains to "organic" search engines such as Inktomi, AltaVista, Fast Search and Transfer's AlltheWeb, which provide technology that scours the Web and uses mathematical algorithms to compile relevant results. Under financial pressure, many such sites developed programs that guaranteed they would "crawl" or search a Web address more often, for a price. Such programs have been growing in popularity in the past year. Inktomi, for example, last year started Index Connect, which lets small and medium-sized sites pay a flat, annual fee to have their Web addresses regularly indexed. Larger sites such as Amazon.com and eBay, that want assurance that more than 1,000 addresses are indexed, pay on a sliding scale depending on the category. These sites can pay anywhere from 15 cents to $1 each time a Web surfer clicks on a hosted page -- which is similar to the Overture model. Others introducing similar programs include AltaVista, Ask Jeeves' Teoma and Fast's AlltheWeb, which plans to begin a paid inclusion service in September. InfoSpace, which operates Excite.com, just this week introduced a new paid inclusion program that lets marketers have their Web site content refreshed in its index every 48 hours. Google delivers unbiased search results from a vast index of Web sites; the company does not accept fees for cataloguing sites. Full disclosure?
Companies that use paid inclusion are taking steps to better disclose the practice in the wake of the FTC's letter last month. Fast's AlltheWeb publicly announced support for the FTC's request and it added a link, called "what's included", to describe its paid inclusion program. AltaVista now includes a tiny link near its results pages called "about", which leads to a disclaimer that describes how companies can pay to have their sites visited more frequently. Teoma also will include an "about" link in coming weeks that is close to search results. LookSmart this week plans to add a pop-up link that outlines how commercial listings can appear in a directory of site reviews. Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, called the changes a boon to consumers that will aid in the editorial integrity of search services. "Many of these search engines have near zero editorial integrity," Ruskin said. "If (listings) are for sale, the public ought to know. Then they are not search engines but ad delivery mechanisms." In the future, analysts say, paid inclusion could become the subject of further inspection. "The issues are very complicated and the FTC has brought us closer to some clarity," said SearchEngineWatch's Sullivan. "But it may very well be a first step." One area of concern for Web site owners is that the search providers could artificially keep their indices stale to promote the for-fee program. The question some ask is what's the incentive to buy into a search index if the technology is already visiting all of its pages every week or two? But if search providers let themselves grow outdated, they face rivals at every turn. Inktomi, for example, recently increased the frequency and depth of its search engine to "crawl" about two billion documents on the Web every two weeks -- a benchmark that rivals Google and Fast. Just a week ago it searched only about 500 million documents about every month according to Vish Makhijani, vice president of Web search at Inktomi. Fast in the last week announced that it is searching 2.4 billion documents. All of the companies say that the paid indexing does not affect the ordering or relevance of search results served to consumers and they comprise, in general, less than 5 percent of the total results. "At the end of the day we're an editorial (service); we have to strike a natural balance with the business aspect," Makhijani said. "We lose distribution if we are compromising the results for commercial benefit."
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