Just wondering what your outlook is.

By trying to preserve the integrity of your organic results through separation of pages which advertise from pages that don’t advertise, you’ve actually compromised the integrity of your organic results. The moment you consciously prevent or exclude a site from being included in the organic results, those results are no longer organic!

I know this is a subtle point, and I know most people either disagree or simply don’t care. But here’s a simple thought experiment: Imagine starting some new website, say to help troubled teens. Nobody knows about your website, and it has a low Google rank. So you start advertising on television. Soon, you’ve driven lots of traffic to your site, and as a result, you start to get a lot of authoritative in-links to your page. Organically. Because people start to know and trust you. Your Google rank “organically” rises.

Now, imagine this same scenario, but instead of doing television advertising, imagine doing Google advertising. Same thing happens.. you start to get attention, web links, authority, etc. But because you are a paying for your Google advertisement, in the interest of “integrity”, Google consciously excludes you from the “organic” results.

Why? What’s the difference?

My point is, if you really are relevant, then you should be listed in the organic results, whether or not you also advertise. No, you should not let people be able to boost their organic rank by giving you money. Google doesn’t do that, which is of course good, and I’m not suggesting that they should.

But there is a reverse discrimination going on here. If Google didn’t exclude you from the organic results, then you would no longer have a need to pay for advertising (the same way you’d no longer have to run television ads) and Google’s revenue would drop. Thus, by keeping your listing artificially separate, Google makes more money.

Where is the integrity in that?

Really disagree with first comment.

By keeping the paid results separate from organic listings, Google maintains the integrity of their index (at least theoretically). For some searches paid results give better results, for most searches, organis results give better results.

I can choose which to use.

I just shared your link w/some Netscape alums and friends. Omid was an smart sales guy at Netscape. He (and Tim Armstrong too), deserves it all.

Brilliant. Hats off Omid!

It would be hard to imagine that having THREE Sponsor Links at the TOP before the Organic SERPs could NOT interfere with the user Search Experience

Take a Look at this Eye Tracking Study of Google SERPs

http://ww1.prweb.com/prfiles/2005/02/28/213516/cropped.jpg

http://blog.eyetools.net/

Would be interesting to get his comment on THIS

Good that you talked abt it now.

Could you please clarify my thinking

Problem: Search results are affected by dollars or not.

Description :U pay for ad. They give you high rank. Eventually your site is doing good and become a prominent player.I mean with out paying for the adword you still deserves a high rank..So why pay for google rank?

What is googles strategy on this?

please do clasrify my email id vijayvijay@gmail.com

Thanks
Vijay

So 1998-99 was an interesting time. In that era, I first heard about Overture, and I first heard about Google. Overture completely rankled me. The whole idea behind paid relevance was anathema to everything I believed search should be. Google, on the other hand, stood in direct opposition to that. And everyone, consciously or subconsciously, realized that, and loved ‘em for it. It was that do no evil approach that everyone loved, and that Google consciously fostered.

However, in time, Google took pointers from the Overture playbook, and introduced AdWords. Yes, yes, I know. They don’t actually mix the paid links in with the rest of the ranks. They put it off to the side. And yet there is still a conflict of interest here, albeit subtle. It goes back to the whole notion of “relevance”. Case in point: Does Google intend for the paid results on the right to be “relevant” to your query? Yes, absolutely. That is the whole point of AdWords. So if these results are so relevant, why are they not on the left hand side, with the rest of the retrieved results? Not because someone paid for them to be there. But why are those web sites not in the ranked list of algorithmically-neutral retrieved results, simply by their own virtue or merit of being relevant? If you’ll notice, the ads are not just text, but do include a link to a web page. So shouldn’t Google’s main search engine rank those pages high, if they are indeed relevant to your query, even if no one has paid for them?

What I am trying to say, and I admit I’m not doing the best job of it, is that the very existence of separate Adwords-based result-links represent a catastrophic and irrecoverable failure of the Google search engine. If the web pages pointed to in these ads really are relevant, then they should appear, ranked highly, on the left. If they are not relevant, then they shouldn’t even be part of the paid results.

The consequence of this, I feel, is that Google has a direct (billions of dollars) financial incentive -not- to improve its search engine. Because if those web pages pointed to in the paid links started showing up in the regular results (just on their own merit and not as a result of being paid to be there) then advertisers would stop spending money on the ads. Advertisers would get the hits, without having to fork over the cash.

So money still affects the search results, it seems. The supposedly technologically neutral ranked list on the left is only improved in ways that don’t interfere with the success of the Adwords program. Indeed, 98% of Google’s revenue comes through this, so if Google improved its results such that advertising was no longer necessary, that the “relevant” commercial links appeared anyway, that money would dry up.

I guess the question I have, to any reader of this blog with more knowledge of this than myself (and that is probably most of you is: are my concerns legitimate? I have reasonable trust that Google doesn’t actually let people boost their relevance, by paying for it, in the main engine. But can Google still organize the world’s information, when a successful organization of that information might do away with the need for advertising altogether?