November 17 2000. Updated November 18 2000.

AltaVista and Lycos selects GoTo as pay per click search provider

GoTo.com and AltaVista have announced an 18-month search distribution and advertising referral agreement. GoTo will become the exclusive pay per click search provider to the users of Alta Vista and Lycos. At the same time Yahoo! ends non-paying listings in the commercial sections of its directory.

Pay per click search engines

GoTo is, as some of you may know, the must successful pay per click search engine on the net. Pay per click (PPC) or pay per performance search engines allows advertisers to buy a position in the search results of a certain query.

If you visit GoTo and search for "search engine promotion", you will get the following No. 1 result:

Web Search Positioning at iProspect.com
iProspect.com is the leader in search engine optimization services for demanding Web companies. Search engine promotion is our business.
www.iprospect.com (Cost to advertiser: $1.81)

It is actually the iProspect company that has chosen the key word and written the description you read here, and they are paying GoTo 1 dollar and 81 cents every time someone clicks on their listing. It should be said that not all listings are that expensive; for less popular search queries customers can be expected to pay as little as one cent.

GoTo has some 32,000 advertisers, and you will find GoTo results on thousands of search sites (including Pandia Metasearch). If you do the same search on AOL.com you will find the following section above the main results:

SPONSORED LINKS
The search results below are provided by a third party and are not necessarily endorsed by AOL

• Web Search Positioning at iProspect.com
• First Place Ranking - Site Promotion
• Web Ignite Corporation

These are the top three results from GoTo. And yes, AOL gets its share of the $1.81.

Among GoTo's other partners are Terra Lycos, CompuServe, EarthLink/MindSpring, Microsoft, Netscape and InfoSpace/Go2Net. Search Engine Watch reports that 60 per cent of the top fifteen search engines have a prominent paid links program.

The system is controversial. Some experts claim that the system will undermine the public's confidence in search results. If you can buy yourself to the top, how can you trust the relevance of the listing?

Anyone who have used search engines for a while has learned to mistrust hit relevance regardless of whether there are paid results or not. Still, this sceptisism must be taken seriously.

GoTo will claim that the search results are relevant, as all listings are controlled by a human being. We have tested the system, and can confirm that this is true. GoTo will check to see whether the site description accurately describes the content of the site.

Hence from a searchers point of view paid listings might be just as relevant as traditional listings. On the other hand, the system does make it more difficult to get a good listing for non-commercial sites that are not willing to pay the fees.

Others complain that sites do not distinguish between paid for and regular listings. This is not the case for GoTo and AOL, but Ask Jeeves' integration of paid results are not marked as such.

AltaVista and GoTo

On November 16 GoTo.com, Inc. and AltaVista Company announced an 18-month search distribution and advertising referral agreement. GoTo will become the exclusive Pay-For-Performance search provider to AltaVista's users.

Under the agreement, GoTo will provide AltaVista's search service users with GoTo top listings on select search results pages of AltaVista beginning in November.

According to GoTo the top 5 GoTo results will appear in a section labeled "Sponsored Listings" on selected AltaVista search results pages. Users can access additional GoTo results by clicking on the "More" link at the end of these results. The Preview is expected to bring several million searches a day. This implementation, is up and running, and can be seen when entering a search at http://listings.altavista.com.

"We believe this relationship brings not only another form of relevant results to our users, but a valuable search offering that represents a meaningful revenue opportunity for AltaVista," says Jeff Housenbold, vice president and general manager, Web & Enterprise Products & Marketing, AltaVista Company.

By saying this Housenbold shows us why search sites go for pay per click results. They need the income, and traditional banner advertising does not bring in enough money.

Lycos Network sites

GoTo will also provide Paid Search Results to Lycos Network Sites, which includes both Lycos.com and HotBot.com, GoTo reports.

Users who conduct searches on Lycos.com, HotBot.com and the directory pages of Lycos Network sites will be shown search results that include GoTo's top 3 listings in a section called "Featured Listings." In addition, at least 2 additional GoTo listings will appear among the first 10 results in the "Web Sites" section on Lycos.com, and GoTo's 4th listing will appear in the number 10 position in HotBot's "Web Results" section.

Yahoo Business Express

This is probably also why Yahoo has stopped accepting free submits to the commercial portion of its directory.

Sites who want to be entered into the "Shopping and Services" or "Business to Business" categories of the Web directory must now use Yahoo's $199 "Business Express" service. There will still be a free submission option for listings in other areas of the Yahoo.com site or to commercial sections of Yahoo's non-US editions.

Yahoo! argues that the Business Express fee allows them to dedicate sustained resources to an expansion of the commercial directory and guarantees that any site submitted to these areas will be reviewed and either added or denied within seven business days.

• AltaVista Selects GoTo as Exclusive Pay-For-Performance Search Provider (GoTo press release)
• GoTo
• Alta Vista
• AOL
• AltaVista Latest To Carry GoTo Paid Listings, by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Watch
• Yahoo! business express FAQ
• Yahoo to require sites to pay (MSNBC)

GoTo advertisers might like to follow the Traffick discussion on GoTo promotion.

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