When you head to Excite.com for a little help making sense of the hundreds of thousands of Web sites about, say, software, the search engine helpfully organizes the results.
“Try these first” suggests the yellow bar near the top left of the screen, just under the big banner ad. If you click your way through any of the links you’ll find a trove of information about software. But what you may not know is that some of it showcases companies that advertise or have partnerships with Excite.com’s owner, Redwood City, Calif.-based Excite@Home.
What was once a simple concept–using search and index technology to sort through Web sites, then ranking them by how useful they’re likely to be to the computer user–has gained a commercial edge because of the relentless pressure on companies like Excite@Home to make money off the contents of the Web.
The cost for consumers as these companies pursue advertising and shopping-related dollars can be confusion and skewed results.
More Top Picks Best Jumperoos For Babies
Companies such as Excite@Home, Yahoo! Inc. and Lycos Inc. started out as free search engines designed to help people sort through the millions of pages posted on servers around the globe. Computer users flocked to these sites, which became popular and convenient onramps to the Web.
With competition, though, the portals began adding a slew of other free services, such as e-mail, news, personal finance information and maps. To pay for it all, the companies first sold advertising space and more recently have begun to take a percentage of on-line purchases made by the people they guide to shopping sites.
But, some observers say, that business model means these companies are spending less money refining the core search function. Meanwhile, the contents of the Web itself have ballooned–from about 6 million pages in 1985 to almost a billion pages today.
“In general, the portals have been falling behind,” says Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, a Mountain View, Calif., company that studies the usability of technology. “They have been adding other features in chasing after the dream of `stickiness,’ ” or the amount of time visitors spend on-site, a question advertisers and e-commerce partners ask before spending money with a portal.
As a result, Nielsen says, “they have been failing in their core mission of helping people find things.”
Executives at these companies hotly deny these charges. “The number of people I have working on search is 10 times the number on any other individual problem,” says Rob Frasca, vice president and general manager of Lycos.com. “I don’t have five PhD’s working anywhere but search.”
Kris Carpenter, director of search products and services at Excite, says the search results on Excite reflect pure editorial judgments made by Web-content editors. She also says the “Try These First” is an interim feature, which will be replaced by a much richer set of links and categories.
Over the past few months portal companies have hurried out a spate of improvements to their search engines. Waltham, Mass.-based Lycos added some 8,000 specialized databases of industry-specific information–construction, agriculture, etc.–to the number of sites searched by its engine. It also is adding a feature that allows users, by aiming their mouse at any word on any page, to instantly see more information about that topic from Lycos.
AltaVista Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif., has launched image, audio and video search. Yahoo!, of Santa Clara, Calif., has added photo search. And Excite greatly expanded its search capabilities to capture and sort more of what’s on the Web.
All the companies have, over the years, improved their anti-spam capabilities–the ability to filter out pornographic material and deliberately duplicated sites.
And a host of smaller companies are jumping into the fray with improved or specialized search.
But for the main portals, the business imperative of luring and keeping advertisers and e-commerce partners continues to clash with the ideal that they and the Internet itself were founded on: that information should be free.
The explosion in Web shopping seems likely to make things worse. For one thing, the underlying technology of search and newer comparison-shopping technologies are easy to yoke together.
Inktomi Corp. of San Mateo, Calif., for instance, supplies Yahoo!, NBC’s Snap and other portals with its search engine, and has launched two newer products, a directory and a comparison-shopping tool.
The companies that use Inktomi’s technology have always been able to customize that technology to add their own content.
If they buy the directory tool, “they have complete control over the content being presented,” says Kevin Brown, Inktomi’s director of marketing. “They can include their own content to recirculate people within their own site instead of sending the user off to some other site. It’s an opportunity for another page view and a potential opportunity for the portal to make some revenue.”
In the future, Brown says, these companies will be able to combine the search and shopping engines so that a user query will yield results from both databases.
“With a very easy set of commands, (the portal companies) can program their page to combine results from the search servers and the shopping servers. The user would get a list of Web pages, news items, and a list of products and merchants.”
A very useful tool if you want to shop, as millions of Americans clearly want to do on the Web. But others are already being driven mildly nuts by the volume of business sites generated by their searches for just information.
“I’ve done searches when I’m certainly not looking for real estate, but the first 50 or 100 hits I get are all real-estate related,” says Mark Zeiss, a Chicago resident. “And there are times when your keyword generates a flood of hundreds of items of the same type of Web site–usually commercial sites.”
In most cases, portals are clear about identifying sites within their own network. On Netscape, Yahoo! or Excite, for example, company-owned sites yielded by search results are labeled as part of those networks.
Some consumers say that as long as that’s made clear, they have no objection.
More Top Picks Moisture Soil
One new search company, GoTo.com, has taken that model to its logical conclusion. It holds auctions for advertisers and gives the winners top placement in the search results–noting in parentheses how much per view the advertiser has paid for that placement.
CEO Jeffrey Brewer says GoTo is simply trying to turn search into a viable business.