When Relevancy is Diminished

 

Whenever I hear the phrase search engines, my mind automatically goes to one thing only: relevant information at exceptional speed.  Naïve right? As a way to make up for their financial losses search engines have become a gateway for marketers and business owners to reach their consumers. Last year, marketers spent more than $13.5 billion on paid search advertising campaigns. Their entrepreneurship of offerings of strategies, tools and techniques on how to increase sales with the lowest cost-per-customer to raise their brand’s visibility online, is anticipated to nearly double by 2013 to more than $26 billion as they get to choose how they want to strategize their branding and marketing efforts on the three different forms of paid search: Paid Submission, Paid Placement, and Paid Inclusion.

This is all great! But as the paid placements and paid inclusions in search engines rollercoaster takes on more speed, there still remains a lack of resolution of how this is all being perceived, and where Google, Yahoo and others have given some thought to the following dilemmas:

1- From the publics perspective (you, me and others): search engines are no longer becoming a mode of finding information. The profitability generated has made them loose their credibility as users may or may not realize that the results they are viewing are from commercial sites. Furthermore, and in particular to paid inclusion, those using search engines will most likely not find relevant search results as relevant content could be pushed farther and farther down in the results to make room for the paid listings. Reliability of information is questionable as there are no definitive standards that exist with regards to the digital contents.

2- From the corporate perspective (companies that pay to enhance the visibility of their brands): The importance of high placement in search results cannot be downplayed;  the more you pay, the higher the chances that your brand’s site will be viewed.

So whether I am a user or an advertiser, knowing what I know now, both these types of advertising continue to raise ethical questions, and their integrity is seriously at risk. So which is better paid inclusion or paid placement? Either way credibility is compromised.

Sooner or later, search engines will begin to lose their users. As sooner rather than later, we will head back to the place where information has been credible and trust worthy- the good old library. What good is speed if relevancy is diminished? 

And we get back to where we started.