Paid Listings in Search Engines
The October 6 BusinessWeek has an interesting subscriber-restricted article about how some search engines offer paid listings. That means that if a company pays them money, their site might appear higher in the search results–or even in the search results at all. Some people claim that these paid listings help searchers by bringing more relevant sites higher in the rankings. Others claim it skews the results. One small business owner declined a popular search engine’s business proposal and found that his company’s Web site disappeared from that search engine’s listing. As a result, he lost a substantial portion of his business. The search engine company claims his site was dropped because of editorial flaws.
