This Just In…”Sponsored Clicks Increasingly Important in Search Results”
location based services
enter For Media Research has just released a report that comes to what many will agree is an alarming conclusion; Sponsored Clicks (or the likelihood of a click that generates revenue for the search engine) are having an increasingly significant bearing on search results.
Among the statistics cited in the report: Google had 1.4 billion searches in March of 2006 that included a sponsored ad. This is a 50% increase vs. a year ago.
942 million searches on Yahoo included a paid ad in March of 2006 representing a 30% increase when compared to the same period last year.
This has enormous implications across all segments of search, both fixed and mobile. If the search engines realize that their bread is being buttered better (try saying that three times fast), by weighting the results to favor links that are likely to be revenue producers a whole new form of bias will suddenly become a dominant factor in search and one that clearly will skew results away from what the searcher is trying to find, and towards what the search engine algorithm is hoping they’ll consider buying.
This presents something of a dilemma; if all the search engines choose to take this tack (and it’s unlikely that they’ll veer AWAY from making more money) than the consumer has little option but to suffer with the inevitable degradation in the quality of natural search results save to not search at all. Hardly a viable choice.
Of course the siliver lining in this particular cloud would have to be the opportunity that this could create for new and better search engines or tools. Personally, I like the idea of highly specific search widgets that can be easily customized by the consumer to conduct any search imaginable with or without advertising.
I’m curious if the readers of Mobilecrunch agree that this is a terrible trend for search and if so, what kinds of initiatives would you like to see in the upstart companies that we will ultimately flock to should we notice a real degradation in the quality of our searches.
