Comment Articles

Searching for pound signs on the Web

Charles Cooper AnchorDesk

Published: 30 Nov 2001 16:31 GMT

Anyone who hates the idea of schlepping to the downtown library to research information as much as I do must have been delighted by the arrival of the Internet. Sitting at home or in the office, you could simply type in a word or phrase and, more often than not, come up with amazingly good search results. As far as convenience went, this even beat the invention of free pizza delivery.

That was before certain bright bulbs came up with the idea of featuring paid listings, or so-called link sponsorship, when users accessed directory search results. With paid listings, a company essentially sells placement to advertisers, whose product listings then appear at the top of the results page.

Eureka! A sure-fire way to finally make some dough, and in the aftermath of the dot-com advertising swoon, that sounded awfully good to battered Internet portal operators who had been betting their future on securing more big CPM-based deals for banner ads. The mugwumps predictably dismissed the idea of commercialized search, but the smarter set recognised what was going on and they eagerly grabbed what was undeniably low-hanging fruit.

And after a slow and controversial start, for-fee search is now all the rage. Overture, formerly known as GoTo.com, is the best-known practitioner. The company, which has now signed up some 50,000 advertisers, has been in the black for several consecutive quarters. It's a considerable achievement, especially when you consider that Overture is nothing more than a site chockablock with links!

America Online, Microsoft and AltaVista subsequently got on board. Yahoo!, which was the last major holdout, jumped on the paid-search bandwagon last month.

So this is the future of the Internet? Maybe, but my purist protest is that this would be a terrific loss to us folks who have come to depend on search as a regular part of our online routines. The MBAs in the peanut gallery muttering, "No harm, no foul," counter that this is simply a more effective way of doing business than the CPM-based model, where the cost of acquiring new customers is much higher. And besides, they add, what's wrong with a company looking to diversify their revenues?