K-Praxis - Topic: Search Technologies - Emerging Face of Information Search Part 4: Paid Listings Vs Organic Listings

As search engines strive to keep up with advertising demand and become the de facto information intermediaries between advertisers and buyers, the debate over paid vs. organic listings is going to haunt the search players - more so when the issue of trust between users of search engines and search players becomes an overriding factor for success or failure for the search industry. We continue our series on emerging face of information search with a look at the ongoing debate on sponsored vs. original or algorithm search results.

Paid Inclusion Controversy

Search media has been reporting about various pros and cons of paid inclusion - a system used by many search engine to accept payment for preferred listing in their indexes - singling out the player like Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and MSN for their paid inclusion programs. Now it seems that both Ask and MSN have reportedly dropped their paid inclusion programs, but Yahoo, it seems has still not come clean on the issue of paid submission and continues to accept payment for paid listings through its Site Match and Site Match Xchange programs.

Interestingly, many of the search media advocates and big wigs seem to have taken a clear stand against paid listing almost unanimously.
Many cite that the FCC guidelines of 2002 are not enough and Yahoo may finally have to cave in to this demand - however, as yet there seems to be no sign of Yahoo relenting.

Paid Inclusion vs. Algorithmic Search Results

Argument for maintaining the purity of search results: The argument is fairly simple. Search engines are not just commercial entities, but because they are crawling and maintaining a database of information that is publicly available and cater to the general need for information they have the responsibility to maintain the integrity of search results. Remember that even though search algorithms like PageRank are written by humans, we largely trust that a company like Google maintains the integrity of the PageRank algorithm search results and does not tamper with it unless and until it is expressed explicitly - good example is the Ethics Committee at Google. The point here is that if a search engine maintains purity of results, users are more likely to trust the search engine because they are confident that the information they are seeking and getting is free from any editorial control by the search intermediary.

Demarcating Paid Inclusion: But how does a search engine demarcate search results? The only guidelines made available by FCC suggest that search players should say that an ad is an ad, yet retain the control over how they want to represent search results. Search media (including Search Engine Watch ) have many times argued that most of the players are trying to indicate and clearly demarcate paid listings allowing the users to choose from organic or paid listings. Users also, many times find listing useful and if they are looking for a specific type of product information they find paid listings an easy way to satisfy that information need.

But are organic listings really organic?: May be this is one of the most relevant yet very difficult questions to ask. Given the attempt at trying to fudge search engine results and attempt to create search spam, it is possible that webmasters could try to cheat on search engines by using various methods that are rampant in search engine optimization. Can the user be sure that what he/she is seeing is organic in real sense where people create information in "good faith"? Recent search engine optimization competition is a very interesting example of this phenomenon. Two months back when you searched for "Nigritude Ultramarine" you did not get a single result and today a similar query throws up 369,000 results. Even though in real sense the result of this competition were a near triumph for the blogging community, this competition throws open a number of questions about the organic vs. non-organic listings.

Organic Vs Paid Listing, Shopping Sites and Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs)

It is interesting to understand the logic of organic vs. paid listing from the point of view of IYPs and shopping sites. In the case of IYPs, each of their listings is a paid listing if data is coming from print yellow pages; this makes it very difficult for the users to understand the demarcation between the paid and organic listings. There is similar debate going on in another segment. Shopping sites many times hide the fact whether they are showing organic results or paid results. Most of their advertisers seem naturally to want better search engine positioning, and many times these sites over-rule what is retrieved from the databases organically.