August 13th, 2001
How to Net Results in Search-Site Seas
By Leslie Miller
USA Today
Getting 87,000 responses to a search engine query is frustrating enough, without having to worry about whether the results you see are actually paid ads in disguise.
Yet search firms, as financially strapped as most other dot-coms, are increasingly seeking new ways to make money—and paid listings are one of the most popular.
While almost all the major search sites now carry such ads, few clearly label them—a situation that prompted consumer advocates to file a complaint recently with the Federal Trade Commission, which regulates deceptive advertising practices.
“Search engines ought to tell us when ads are ads. It’s deceptive when they don’t,” says Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert. The complaint cites AltaVista, AOL, Microsoft, Lycos, LookSmart and others.
Advertisers like paid listings because they pay only when somebody clicks on their link. “The ad business, both online and off, has been in a severe depression,” says Patrick Keane, senior analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix. Search sites “are just trying to survive.”
Search experts compare paid listings to the Yellow Pages. “It’s important that consumers understand that paid listings are not necessarily bad,” says Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Watch Web site. If you’re shopping online, “they might even be more relevant than the regular listings,” he adds.
Ruskin doesn’t expect the FTC to make search sites give up paid listings, just to require that they be identified as ads. “Obviously they’re poorly labeled on purpose; it’s not rocket science to label things clearly,” he says.
But even without clear labels, consumers can recognize paid listings, say Sullivan and three other experts who specialize in search issues. Here are their tips for understanding how search sites work and using them effectively.
* Recognize ads. Google has been praised for labeling its paid listings “sponsored links” (and setting off ads with a background color), but most other search pages use code words such as “featured sites” and “partner listings,” which many people find less clear.
“They may not be marked as ads,” but they sound like ads, says Chris Sherman, president of Searchwise, a Boulder, Colo.-based consulting firm. “Anybody with a reasonable grain of sense would realize that these are some advertising kind of thing.”
Although sites differ, paid listings usually appear at the top of the first page of results. “Very few people will go past the first page,” Sherman says. “They assume search engines will put the best results on the first page, but they may be on the second or third.”
The actual results of your search usually appear below the paid listings, with a heading such as “We found 24,317,948 results.”
“Users most of the time don’t have a clue on how to use a search engine—they just click on the first thing they see,” says Robin Nobles of Hattiesburg, Miss., who writes books on how to “optimize” Web pages to get them listed higher.
* Look before you click. Probably the most basic advice for searchers is to look carefully at page descriptions. “Don’t be too quick to pull the trigger,” Sherman says. “Try to understand what it is before you click through.”
For example, check the Web address of the site and see if it seems authoritative; if you’re looking for health information and a link points to the Mayo Clinic or the National Institutes of Health, you’re probably on solid ground, “but if it points to somebody’s home page on GeoCities,” you might want to think twice, he says.
Some links show just a string of numbers (the underlying IP address), in which case “quite often you can distrust it; why aren’t they revealing their name?” says Sherman, who writes a daily e-mail column for Search Engine Watch.
* Distinguish between directories and search engines. If you’re looking for information on a general topic, such as Sufism or Yorkshire terriers, you’re usually better off starting at a directory rather than a search engine, says Kevin Elliott, who writes about search issues for About.com, a network of sites on a wide range of topics, run by 700 expert “guides.”
Directories are hand-compiled by humans and contain descriptions or reviews of sites on broad topics. But engines use “crawlers” or “spiders,” automated programs that constantly crawl the Web and index pages based on text, titles and other information fields.
Examples of popular engines, Elliott says, include Google, Excite, Lycos and AltaVista; directories include Yahoo, AOL Search, MSN Search “and, of course, About.”
He notes that almost all directories are now searchable, and many, such as Yahoo (still the No. 1 search site), have partnerships with engines. If your search terms are not found in Yahoo’s directory, for example, the search automatically kicks over to Google, which indexes 1.3 billion Web pages.
“When you’re looking for the obscure thing, a needle in a haystack, crawlers are the places to go,” Sullivan says. “They get into the nooks and crannies of the Web.”
Yet another option is the “metasearch” site, which queries several search engines simultaneously. “What may be missed on one may show up in another,” Elliott says. Metasearch sites include MetaCrawler, Dogpile, Mamma, CNET’s Search.com, and newcomers ProFusion, Ixquick and Vivisimo.
* Learn a few “advanced search” tricks. Even though many searchers feel intimidated by search engines’ language of esoteric “Boolean” logic (named for the 19th century English mathematician George Boole), it can be helpful to be aware of a few shortcuts, particularly on sites you use regularly. These tips are usually labeled “advanced search,” and they help weed out the clutter.
“I always put everything in quotes,” Nobles says. “If I just want information on dog supplies, not on dogs or other kinds of supplies, I put ‘dog supplies’ in quotes.”
On AltaVista, searching for dog supplies without quotes brings up 10,503,810 results; putting quotes around the phrase yields 8,043.
“There are some really easy tips that tend to apply across the board,” Elliott says. One of his favorites is using a plus or minus sign to refine a search. If you’re researching Tasmanian devils, for example, but want just the real animal and not the Warner Bros. animated character, you could type “Tasmanian devil—cartoon.”
* Consider niche tools. When you’re searching for a particular type of information, such as music files or phone listings, consider using specialty search sites, available for many categories. If you’re looking for news headlines, for example, an excellent place to search is Moreover.com, Sullivan says; if you’re seeking reference sites, try Xrefer.com. Search Engine Watch has links to many specialty pages (searchenginewatch.com/links).
Also, some specialized tools can find information that is invisible to search engines, because spiders crawl only on standard Web pages. Sherman notes that a growing amount of online information is now in other formats—reports in PDF files and information buried in databases, for example.