The Federal Trade Commission remains concerned that consumers may not be able to tell when search results are advertiser-sponsored, thanks to sometimes-unclear disclosure on the part of search companies.
Last year, the FTC notified Web operators--including Yahoo-owned AltaVista and America Online--that they must clearly mark advertisements that appear within their search results. Though some reform trickled through the industry, questions still linger about how well companies label the commercial listings that appear when Web surfers delve into their indices. ...
Paid inclusion is a class of search marketing in which companies, such as Yahoo-owned Inktomi, accept fees to "crawl" Web sites more often so that fresh product data is included in the index. In Inktomi's case, some marketers pay when Web surfers click on their listings. Typically, those paid-for links are not marked. ...
Two programs expected to fuel that growth are sponsored placement and--to a lesser extent--paid inclusion. ... Sponsored placement allows an advertiser to pay for higher ranking or prominence on a results page, relative to a keyword search. Marketers bid for that placement, paying a set price for each time a surfer clicks on it.
Paid inclusion is less well known than paid placement among search engine users, but it's no less popular among marketers. The programs largely pertain to "editorial" search engines such as Inktomi, AltaVista and AlltheWeb, which provide technology that scours the Web and uses mathematical algorithms to compile results relevant to users' queries.
In contrast, Google delivers unbiased search results from a vast index of Web sites; the company does not accept fees for cataloging sites.
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