November 2 2000

Inktomi introduces paid submissions

The pure searchers among our readers may not realize this, but getting listed in search engines might be a very frustrating experience indeed.

The search engine company Inktomi, which powers search sites like AOL, iWon, MSN & HotBot, now offer a paid subscription service where websites are guaranteed a listing in the Inktomi database.

Inktomi promises to reindex the pages you pay for every 48 hours. Inktomi Search/Submit is priced according to the number of URLs (webpages) you submit. Billing, reporting, and account management is through a company called Position Technologies.

Initial pricing for a one year subscription (pages price per URL) is:

• First Page: $20.00
• Pages 2-100: $10.00
• Pages 101+: $6.00

The question Web masters around the globe is asking is whether a subscription will influence your site's rating on the result lists. Inktomi says that website owners who sign up for this service will be held to the same anti-spam and metrics Inktomi uses today.

However, given that the Inktomi databases is divided into several parts and that only sites belonging to the "core" database can hope for a good listing on common search terms, a subscription may probably lead to better results.

Moreover, Inktomi guarantees a listing. If this guarantee is applied to a search engine like HotBot, which continually drops pages out of its Inktomi-based index, it could be worth a lot. If (and this is a big if) Inktomi's search partners update their own databases accordingly, this new system will also make it possible to add new pages containing fresh news. Today, it may take weeks -- if not months -- to get a page listed.

Inktomi says that it will continue to offer the free Add URL service through its search portal customers. "Additionally, Inktomi's crawlers will continue to spider the Web and include the most relevant pages in the searchable Web database."

We certainly hope so. Otherwise searchers may loose a lot of valuable non-commercial, "poor" websites, that cannot afford to pay these fees.

• Inktomi FAQ on Search/Submit service
• Position Technologies

Thanks to Greg Notess on the Search-L Search Engine Discussion List for information on Inktomi's new policy.

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