By Paul Lang, Editor, Sell It!
May 10th, 2000

See Also   The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet   Alternative Payment Solutions   Fraud Prevention Tools   Top Tools to Help You Boost Customer Service   iV-Caller Verification Service   Make Your Price Sell!   FindWhat.com   Make Your Knowledge Sell!   HumanClick   Netship   iFulfill.com   Nexchange   Nothing But 'Net   Netwhistle.com   Bigstep.com   Make Your Site Sell!   AWeber   GoTo.com   Constant Contact   WebAdverts   PersonalStore   SiteInspector   LinkExchange   ClickTrade   Safe   eCHARGE   MilliCent

Product	FindWhat.com
Description	Search engine with paid-for rankings
Available	Now
Pricing	Keywords bid on by advertisers

When GoTo.com was launched back in June '98 it radically altered the search engine landscape. Prior to its launch, search engines fell broadly in to two categories, the true search engines (such as Alta Vista) and human-reviewed directories (such as Yahoo!).

Getting a good listing in any of these 'traditional' search engines or directories can prove to be very difficult. A whole new science (or black art as some would claim!) called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has evolved to provide varying (and even contradictory) recipes for getting good listings on the search engines, whilst volumes have been written on the seemingly impossible process of getting listed on Yahoo!.

GoTo.com changed all this. Overnight, getting listed on a search engine became automatic, with the ranking determined solely by how much an advertiser was willing to pay. (See our review of GoTo.com for full details of how this works) .

I've always been a big fan of GoTo.com and I still spend the lion's share of my advertising budget with them. However, GoTo.com is starting to become a victim of its own success. As it has become more popular, the bid amount needed to secure a good ranking has steadily increased and unless you are willing and able to continually revise your bids upwards, the traffic that GoTo.com delivers will tail off. To illustrate this, I experienced a 30% drop in traffic between February and April despite increasing some of my bids during this period.

According to GoTo.com, the average keyword price has risen from $0.08 to $0.19 over the last 12 months and this trend looks likely to continue. However, the bids for popular keywords have risen even more dramatically. For example, my most important keyword is 'e-commerce': when I first started advertising on GoTo.com I could easily have got a top-10 position with a bid of $1 - now I would need to bid over $5!

Not surprisingly, the success of GoTo.com has inspired a number of competitors to spring up and Nathan Power lists no fewer than 25 on his new Web site PayPerClickSearchEngines.com.

Of these competitors, FindWhat.com is the biggest, claiming 2 million searches per day against GoTo.com's 5 million. And it's growing rapidly too - back in January they ran less than 0.5 million searches per day.

Currently, the bid prices for top rankings on FindWhat.com are generally much lower than on GoTo.com. For example, the table below compares current bid prices needed to achieve top, tenth, and twentieth ranking for the keyword 'e-commerce':

Ranking	GoTo.com	FindWhat.com
#1	$6.02	$0.94
#10	$5.29	$0.55
#20	$2.52	$0.26

Opening a FindWhat.com advertising account is a straightforward process and only requires a $25 (non-refundable) deposit. If you're already a GoTo.com advertiser you'll be pleased to learn that FindWhat.com has imitated most of GoTo.com's management features, although in general I find the FindWhat.com interface easier to use. However, there are several key differences between the two search engines that are worth pointing out:

1. GoTo.com review keyword purchases for relevancy before adding them to their database, whilst FindWhat.com adds them immediately. Whilst having your bids listed immediately might seem attractive, there is a danger that unscrupulous advertisers could bid on irrelevant keywords and thus lower the relevance of search results. Although FindWhat.com have a similar relevancy rules to GoTo.com's I can't help feeling that it must be much more difficult to enforce these after the bids have been accepted and added to the system.

2. Although FindWhat.com's reporting system presents good summary information in a format that is clearer than GoTo.com, it lacks the flexibility and depth of GoTo.com's system. For example, FindWhat.com's reports cannot easily be downloaded to a PC for further analysis.

3. FindWhat.com also lacks GoTo.com's advanced payment features. For example, I have set up GoTo.com to automatically add more money to my account once it falls to a certain level - no similar feature exists on FindWhat.com.