By Leslie Walker Thursday, December 19, 2002; Page
E01
Marketing via search engines, once thought to be the province of
hucksters and tricksters, showed signs of becoming a major force on the
Internet this year as more and more companies turned to consultants to
place ads in search results and help them gain greater prominence in the
actual result listings.
The growing interest in such marketing comes as Internet users
become increasingly reliant on search engines to navigate the Web. Search
engines these days are practically public utilities, influencing such life
decisions as what we buy, who we hang out with, even what we
believe.
Given their importance, many companies have sought out online marketing
gurus for help deciphering the intricacies of how the search engines work.
They also have sought advice on how to capitalize on a move by several
major search services to sell new kinds of ads that run with the results.
MoreVisibility.com said it added 150 clients to its roster of 350
companies (including Toyota, Unisys Corp. and Sears Hardware) that pay
the firm to improve their positions in Internet search results.
"Most companies need help figuring out how to run a successful
search campaign because search engines are constantly rearranging the
chairs on their decks," said Dennis Pushkin, chief executive of
MoreVisibility.com.
This year ushered in big changes in Web searching. First was the
explosive growth in paid listings, which are text ads that appear directly
in or alongside regular search results. Type in "computer" on Google, for
example, and you will see a paid ad from Gateway at the top of the page
and another paid ad from Dell Computer Corp. on the right. Below the paid
ads, Apple Computer Inc.'s Web site appears first in the free listing of
matching Web sites deemed most relevant by Google's special mathematical
formula that analyzes the 3 billion Web pages in its index. Paid listings
have become big business, claming nearly $1 billion of the Internet's $6
billion to $8 billion in advertising this year.
An equally big change this year was Google's move into first
place in the search-technology race. Roughly 41 million of the 113 million
people conducting Web searches in November did so using Google, according
to ComScore Media Metrix. Moreover, tens of millions more saw Google
results elsewhere because the company's technology now powers all Web
searching at Yahoo and America Online, giving Google the biggest share of
the market.
Yahoo was the search leader in its heyday, but it overhauled its
site in October and demoted its own Web directory so that it no longer
even appears in the initial search results. To see Yahoo's own results --
the ones that made it famous -- you'd have to click on a tab labeled
"directory" and go to another page. What's shown by default on Yahoo now
are Web sites that pay to be in an ad network called Overture, followed by
matching free results from Google. Something similar happens when you
search on AOL, which displays both paid listings and free listings
provided by Google.
Confused yet? It gets gnarlier. Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.com is
technically the search leader, drawing 49 million visitors to its search
page in November. But that counts the millions of people who visit MSN
search accidentally because they typed an inactive Web address into the
Internet Explorer browser. Moreover, MSN doesn't have its own search
technology. Like AOL and Yahoo, it displays results from other search
companies.
All this reshuffling among search engines has a huge effect on
ordinary Web sites, many of which depend on traffic referred to them by
Google and Yahoo. Yahoo threw a monkey wrench into holiday marketing
budgets at thousands of commercial sites when it demoted its directory
virtually overnight and replaced it with Google's listings. Sites
accustomed to being the first displayed when people searched for a
particular phrase, such as "radio-controlled cars," got quite a
shock.
"We had one partner who had worked hard to get the top listing on
Yahoo for the phrase 'pay phones.' One day we woke up, and the listing had
dropped off the face of the earth," recalled Flint McGlaughlin, who runs
an Internet research firm called MarketingExperiments.com.
Another firm McGlaughlin does research for, TechSavings.com, said
it nearly quadrupled sales this year, to $4 million a month, by paying
for placement in comparison shopping engines such as DealTime.com and
PriceGrabber.com. The Gainesville, Fla., computer parts distributor said
it also spent more than $13,000 last month to appear in Google's paid
listings.
Google's secret sauce -- the mathematical formula it uses to rank
each Web page -- relies heavily on how many other Web pages link to it,
but that's only one of more than 100 variables it considers in determining
relevance.
Google has 50 PhDs on staff who tinker with the formula almost
daily. They are constantly trying to foil marketers who use tricks, such
as creating fake "doorway" pages to fool robots. Google purges from its
index sites it catches breaking its rules, which forbid the use of
doorways and similar tricks.
"It requires more work to take shortcuts on Google now, and we
have definitely seen a shrinking in the number of people doing unethical
search engine marketing," said Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer.
