Fast offers pay for inclusion program

Fast Search and Transfer from Norway is the next search engine company to offer a pay for inclusion program. Fast owns the search engine which powers the American and Asian versions of the Lycos portal.

Inktomi, a search engine used by HotBot, MSN, AOL and other sites, has for some time now offered a pay for inclusion program through the companies Network Solutions and Position Technologies.

Inktomi webmasters guarantees that the search engine spider will revisit their sites at 48 hours intervals. The search engine database stays up to date, and the webmasters can be sure that the pages they pay for are included all the time.

Some of the web site owners probably also use the frequent updates to fine tune their Web design for better rankings. Inktomi will not improve the rankings of webpages just because you pay for them, though.

Most search companies face serious cash flow problems as a result of falling ad revenues. The fact that Fast now follows in the footsteps of Inktomi comes as no surprise. AltaVista is rumored to plan a similar move.

There is one major difference between the Inktomi offering and the Fast PartnerSite programme. While the Inktomi programme only guarantees inclusion in their main search engine database, it seems that Fast will add a Web site search facility in the bargain. This means that site owners can add a special search form to their webpages that can be used by visitors to search their particular website.

"As the Internet continues to grow, it is becoming more and more difficult for small and medium sized enterprises to be visible to their target users online.” says John M. Lervik, FAST&#'s chief technology officer. "When you consider that searching is the second most popular Internet application to e-mail and that a majority of e-commerce transactions originate with a search listing, visibility becomes paramount for business success."

FAST PartnerSite features include:

• Hosted site search application -- All publicly available pages of member sites are crawled, indexed and maintained in a dedicated site search catalog within the FAST data center, enabling site visitors to quickly find the information they are searching for.
• Customized page results -- Site owners can present search results with a custom look-and-feel with included, simple-to-use query language and XML DTDs
• Guaranteed inclusion in the FAST Web Search index -- Member sites are fully integrated with the FAST Web Search index, enabling sites to gain visibility through FAST&#'s network of portal partners and search destinations, including Terra Lycos, SPRAY, LookSmart and AllTheWeb.com
• Point-and-click crawling -- After site owners register online by credit card, the FAST crawler automatically facilitates the deep-crawling process; users receive account management tools to control which of their sites pages are included in the index
• Search results information -- Site owners will receive important information on how well they achieved their visibility objectives so they can fine tune their Web site to be more attractive to their target user base.
• Guaranteed site re-indexing -- FAST PartnerSite customers' sites are re-indexed daily to ensure the most up-to-date web search results
• FAST PartnerSite supports 46 languages

Now, why should webmasters make use of this offer? After all, Fast's main objective is to build a search engine database that covers "all the Web, all the time", which means that your site will probably be listed anyway. If you already have a website search facility, it doesn't seem that Fast has that much more to offer.

In spite of this, we suspect that many webmasters will become members of the programme, the main reason being the ability to see the results of webpage optimization after 24 hours.

Designers can fine tune the webpage coding to the changing whims of the Fast algorithms and the tactics of competing website owners. Actually, Fast claims that it will give subscribers information on how to optimize their pages for the Fast search engine! Webmasters will also know when their site has been located by the search engine spider.

Site owners that do not have the time or resources to spend on systematic search engine positioning, will probably not benefit from taking part.

We have not found information on pricing.

Fast AllTheWeb search engine
Fast company home pages
Fast Press release
Fast PartnerSite homepage
Webmaster World discussion on the new program
Inktomi Search/Submit program (Position Technologies)

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