The Web giant and others argue that because paid inclusion does not guarantee marketers placement in their indices, it is not a wholly commercial enterprise. Rather, it's a service that helps create a comprehensive database for consumer queries, they say.
Yahoo is widely expected to launch a new paid-inclusion programme as it begins to replace search partner Google with its own technology. Complicating matters, Overture was slated to introduce a paid-inclusion programme that combined its two new crawlers this month, but Yahoo spokeswoman Diana Lee would not say whether that will still happen now that it has the three technologies to consider.
The Inktomi and Overture acquisitions were the result of Yahoo's efforts to regain an edge in the search industry after years of neglecting it. It also wants to compete with rival Google in the lucrative commercial search market. Financial analysts peg commercial search as a $2bn industry this year and worth as much as $7bn in four years.
Paying the piper
Two programmes expected to fuel that growth are sponsored placement and -- to a lesser extent -- paid inclusion.
Sponsored placement allows an advertiser to pay for higher ranking or prominence on a results page, relative to a keyword search. Marketers bid for that placement, paying a set price for each time a surfer clicks on it.
Overture and Google are the leaders in this mode of marketing, licensing results to portals, Internet service providers and other dot-coms, which split the fees from clicks. Web sites display those ads off to the side, at the top or bottom of search results, marking them as ads in compliance with the FTC's request last year.
Paid inclusion is less well known than paid placement among search engine users, but it's no less popular among marketers. The programmes largely pertain to "editorial" search engines such as Inktomi, AltaVista and AlltheWeb, which provide technology that scours the Web and uses mathematical algorithms to compile results relevant to users' queries.
Under financial pressure, many such services have developed programmes to guarantee companies that they would "crawl," or search, their Web addresses more often. Though companies pay for the service, all of the providers say that they do not guarantee a higher ranking for customers in search results.
