March 31 2001.

FindWhat to deliver paid results to Excite

A deal between the pay-per-click search engine FindWhat and Excite@Home will introduce paid results at Excite and Webcrawler.

Pay-per-click search engines are becoming increasingly popular among webmasters as well as search engines (although not -- probably -- among Internet searchers.)

The webmasters get the opportunity to bypass the search engine algorithms, buying their way to the top of the result lists, while the search engines get some sorely needed revenue.

There are an incredibly large number of pay-per-click search engines out there, although only one of them has become a player in the most important part of the search market. GoTo delivers paid results to major search sites like AltaVista, America Online, Ask Jeeves, Lycos and HotBot.

The rest of the pack have mainly fought among themselves for getting access to minor metasearch engines (The main exception being Sprinks, due to its close relationship with About, a directory slash collection of theme based sites).

Now GoTo is finally getting some competition in the major league, as FindWhat.com has entered into an agreement with Excite@Home. In a mail to advertisers FindWhat says that "Beginning April 9th, FindWhat.com listings will appear in Excite.com and WebCrawler.com search results!"

According to a press release from FindWhat the agreement calls for Excite's users to receive up to four of FindWhat.com's targeted listings, which will be easily identifiable as paid-for-positions. Users who are looking to expand their number of search results will also be able to click on a link to try their search on FindWhat.com.

"In order to land high-profile traffic deals, we've had to tighten up our relevancy policies and procedures," FindWhat says in its mail. "To that end, all changes to titles, descriptions, and URLs of listings must go through our customer service department. While we do apologize for this inconvenience, we must ensure that our search results are not diluted by unclear or irrelevant listings."

This is clearly a necessity. The legitimacy of paid results rest on the search engine delivering relevant results. Although the advertisers formulate the site titles and descriptions themselves, GoTo has had a rather strict policy regarding the relationship between these description and the actual page. No searcher should be tricked into visiting a page of no relevance to her or his query, meaning that all submissions have to be controlled by human beings.

Other pay-per-click search engines have not been that strict, although FindWhat has obviously found that this is the only way to go.

GoTo recently changed their pricing policy, increasing the minimum bid per click to 5 cents. This will mean that a lot of smaller companies and sites on a tight budget will stop advertising on GoTo.

The minimum prize on FindWhat continues to be 1 cent, meaning that FindWhat will become a tempting alternative for this part of the market. On the other hand, to FindWhat this may mean a lot of editorial work for a rather limited amount of money. Checking a 1 cent submission is just as time consuming as a 1 dollar bid.

FindWhat
Excite
AltaVista and Lycos selects GoTo as pay per click search provider (Pandia November 2000)
FindWhat Press release
FindWhat.com Lands Distribution Deal with Excite (Internet.com)
GoTo
Sprinks

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