Once Deemed Evil, Google Now Embraces “Paid Inclusion”

[Cleo]

It's a good thing that we are all making truckloads of cash because poor Google seems to need more money.

Back when Google was an upstart search engine, one way it distinguished itself was to fight against a pay-to-play business model called “paid inclusion.” Indeed, paid inclusion was one of the original sins Google listed as part of its “Don’t Be Evil” creed. But these days, Google seems comfortable with paid inclusion, raising potential concerns for publishers and searchers alike.

What Is Paid Inclusion?
There are two main ways that companies show up in Google’s search results. Companies either buy ads or hope that Google decides that their content is relevant enough to appear in what are called the “organic” or “natural” or “editorial” listings.

Companies can’t pay Google to show up in these organic results. It’s similar to how things work with a reputable newspaper. Companies get “coverage” to the degree they are deemed to have earned it. The only difference is that Google uses a search “algorithm” that weighs various ranking factors to decide what’s relevant, rather than employing human editors and reporters.

Here’s another similarity with newspapers. Most people ignore Google’s ads, just as most people ignore newspaper ads. Still, enough people click on those ads to make Google billions of dollars per year. But imagine how much more Google might earn if it could somehow sell those main listings, the editorial ones?

That’s where paid inclusion comes in. It’s a method that search engines (other than Google) used to use sell those main listings yet still claim that there was an “editorial” component to them. With paid inclusion, companies pay to be considered but aren’t guaranteed to rank well. The algorithm ultimately decides, not payment.

Google, Evil & The Death Of Paid Inclusion
If all that makes your head hurt, you’re to be forgiven. Believe me, years of trying to explain how paid inclusion works made my own head hurt.

Search engines like AltaVista or Inktomi would tell the searching public that they had the freshest, most comprehensive collection of web pages out there. These same search engines would tell publishers that they should do paid inclusion because otherwise they might miss collecting their pages or take ages updating them. Talk about mixed messages!

Google was the main holdout among the major search engines. Back in 2001, when paid inclusion programs were growing in popularity, it told me:

We have no plans for a paid inclusion program. As we’ve stated in the past, our search results represent our editorial integrity, and we have no plans to alter our automated process, which works very well in gathering information and delivering highly relevant results.
When Google went public in 2004, the Founders Letter that was part of its IPO filing specifically named paid inclusion as a practice that should be shunned, saying under the “Don’t Be Evil” section:

Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.
The full IPO filing has other references against paid inclusion, such as (I’ve bolded the key parts):

Objectivity. We believe it is very important that the results users get from Google are produced with only their interests in mind.
We do not accept money for search result ranking or inclusion. We do accept fees for advertising, but it does not influence how we generate our search results. The advertising is clearly marked and separated. This is similar to a newspaper, where the articles are independent of the advertising.

Some of our competitors charge web sites for inclusion in their indices or for more frequent updating of pages. Inclusion and frequent updating in our index are open to all sites free of charge.

We apply these principles to each of our products and services. We believe it is important for users to have access to the best available information and research, not just the information that someone pays for them to see.

And:

Froogle [now called Google Shopping] enables people to easily find products for sale online….
Most online merchants are also automatically included in Froogle’s index of shopping sites. Because we do not charge merchants for inclusion in Froogle, our users can browse product categories or conduct product searches with confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased.

After Google went public, Microsoft and Ask.com, feeling the pressure, dropped their paid inclusion programs later that year. Yahoo was the last holdout, finally dropping its program in 2009.

Google & The Resurrection Of Paid Inclusion
Having previously declared paid inclusion to be evil, can it really be that Google is doing it now? Yes, though Google’s not been using that name, and it also really didn’t become apparent until last month.

Google Hotel Finder and Google Flight Search were both launched last year. On the surface, they seem like Google’s other “vertical” or topic-focused search engines, such as Google Images, Google News or Google Shopping, which allow you to search for certain specific types of information.

Unlike Google’s other vertical search engines, however, payment seems to have a role in being included in Google Hotel Finder and Google Flight Search. Maybe Google will find your hotel or your flight and list it for “free.” But it seems more likely you’ll appear if you have a paid relationship.

This only became evident after Google launched its new comparison boxes last month, as we asked questions about how the underlying services that power those boxes got their results.

The boxes also draw from Google Advisor, which is a type of financial products vertical search engine. Listings for credit cards, CDs, checking and savings accounts can be found with Google Advisor, but mainly from merchants who pay to be included, it seems.

This is a dramatic change. How does Google justify the shift? When I spoke with Amit Singhal, the Google executive who oversees all of Google’s search products, earlier this month at our SMX London conference, he explained that Google needed to have paid relationships to gain some data:

Fundamentally, time and time again, we started noticing that a class of queries could not be answered based upon just crawled data….
We realized that we will have to either license data or go out and establish relationships with data providers.

Since some of this data required paid relationships, Google decided some type of disclosure was required:
To be super safe, where we have a deal between Google and another party, we didn’t want to call those fully organic results, because they are based on a deal….
After much debate, we said “OK, let’s be extra cautious. Let’s call it ‘sponsored’ so that we tell our users that there’s a special relationship that Google has established with someone.”

But what about cases where Google has traditionally been able to get data for free, such as with shopping search? Might that or other verticals shift eventually to a paid inclusion model? Singhal said:

In every area we’re looking at what’s the best possible model….
Clearly all these areas are ripe for innovation, and that’s what we’re going to do.

http://marketingland.com/once-deemed...nclusion-13138

[Bill]

google sucks so bad for small business. it's become a gang of criminal mercenaries.

It's an emotional position, but I has it!

[JustRobert]

I have said this before, It will not surprise me if the whole first page of any google search will be purchased or at least the main organic section is where the ads will be and the right hand corner an organic display.

As it is you can find paid ads in the main section now. I just typed "las vegas hotels" into search and the first 3 spots in the main organic section are purchased ads.

[fetishbank]

It's time for an anti-trust panel to look into it...