So the "relevant paid link" to Wedding Channel may well be more useful to the hapless AltaVista searcher looking up "weddings" than, say, most of the first 10 unpaid results that turn up. Those seem to offer a lot of geographically specific information that may not be of much value -- unless you happen to be in the Albany, San Diego, Hawaii, Pennsylvania or Aruba areas.

The companies buying AltaVista's links are aiming at the search-engine users who haven't yet figured this out, and who insist on using the search engines as tools to find their way to general information or top-level sites. If, for instance, you want to find the home page for the New York Times, don't expect much help from AltaVista: Search on the phrases "New York Times," "The New York Times" and "new york times" and you will get three entirely different sets of top 10 results -- none of which include links to the New York Times' own site (perhaps because it requires users to register, which blocks out the "spider" or automated program the search engine uses to index Web pages).

AltaVista does offer a link to the Times' actual site via a service called Realnames that pops up at the top of the search list. And guess what? If you want to be listed by Realnames, you have to pay them.

In other words, AltaVista needs to sell search results and employ work-arounds like Realnames -- because that's the only way it can shortcut its own overgrown index and get relevant answers to less skilled users. Like all the search engines from its generation that have grown up to become "portals" -- including Excite, Infoseek, Yahoo and Lycos -- AltaVista today has tons of Web traffic and vast hordes of users. Too much of the time, though, it doesn't have good answers.

For those, increasingly, you have to turn to a newer generation of search tools that use smarter schemes -- and that (so far) aren't selling off their results. My favorite new search site, Google (I wrote about it last December), ranks its results based on how many other sites link to each listing -- and how highly ranked those sites are. Its complex algorithm generates the best search results I've seen; one additional advantage is that the site, still technically in beta testing, hasn't yet ramped up commercially, so the pages are uncluttered with promotions. Type "New York Times" into Google and it sends you right to the newspaper's site -- without any distractions and without that company having to pay to get there. Even Google doesn't do that well with the "weddings" query, though; it's still a search engine indexing a vast number of pages, and it still doesn't provide great results from searches on general topics.

With AskJeeves, another highly touted Web information service, you phrase your search in common English -- like, "Where can I find information about weddings?" -- and the site sends you to a series of related questions that it "knows" the answers to: in this case, "How should I provide music at my wedding?" or "Where can I set up a personal Web site for my wedding?" or "What are some suggestions for wedding music?" That might be helpful, but it's also cumbersome and narrow. It doesn't simply provide me with what I'm looking for -- a list of the Web's best wedding-information resources.

For that, I found my best results with DirectHit. DirectHit isn't a search engine itself but a technology that's licensed to other companies -- you'll find it in action on HotBot. With DirectHit, search results are ranked based on the choices other users have previously made; if lots of previous searchers for wedding information actually clicked through to a particular site when it turned up in the results, and spent time on that site, it gets ranked higher. With DirectHit on HotBot, nearly all of the top 10 search results for "weddings" point to sites that are deep, relevant and useful.

If AltaVista were able to provide those kinds of results, I doubt its "relevant paid links" program would be much of an issue. As it is, AltaVista and its cohorts in the first generation of search engines are stuck: They've got a mass of users that other Web sites would kill for -- but they're not delivering what they promise. That means sooner or later, users will drift away to more effective services. And then who will want to buy AltaVista's links?
salon.com | April 22, 1999

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