Buying Alta Vista rankings?

[Prentiss Riddle]

> Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 07:21:52 -0700
> From: "Shirl Kennedy" <sdk at mindspring.com>
> To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
> Subject: Buying Alta Vista rankings?
> 
> From Internet World
> http://www.internetworld.com/print/current/industry/19980518-deal.html
> 
> | May 18, 1998
> | Deal Allows Companies To Buy Top Spot in Search Results
> | By Elizabeth Gardner
> | 
> | AltaVista announced an agreement with centraal Corp., Palo Alto, Calif.,
> | last week to incorporate its "Real Name" search system into each AltaVista
> | search.
> | 
> | As of last week, any AltaVista search that includes one or more of the
> | 530,000-odd keywords and key phrases in the Real Name database will now
> | return, at the top of the results, a list of sites that the database has
> | associated with those keywords and phrases.

The Internet World article notwithstanding, if I understand correctly,
Alta Vista is not exactly selling rankings.  Rather, before presenting
the search results they report on matches with the RealNames database.
RealNames can be thought of as sort of a cross between OCLC's PURL
scheme and a trademark database.  For $40/year, you can register your
company or organization name with RealNames.com and keep somebody else
from getting it.

Alta Vista is not the only one place where plans are afoot to use
RealNames.  There's currently some sort of a RealNames plugin available
and reportedly a future release of Netscape will include RealNames
support in the location input window, so if you type "ibm" into
Netscape you'll automatically be taken to "http://www.ibm.com/".

(Perhaps RealNames are an attempted solution to the coming debacle of
expanded domain names, in which users who want to go to IBM won't know
whether to type "www.ibm.com" or "www.ibm.biz" or what.)

You can see RealNames in action at http://altavista.digital.com or
http://www.realnames.com .

Meanwhile, according to press reports, another search engine called
goto.com *is* planning to sell search rankings to the highest bidder
(although rough experiments suggest that they aren't doing so yet).
See:

        http://www.seattletimes.com/news/technology/html98/news_030198.html

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle at rice.edu
-- Webmaster, Rice University / http://is.rice.edu/~riddle
-- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.