| Product: |
godado.co.uk |
| Date: |
22/08/00 (50 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Targeted relevant results for both buyers and sellers.
Disadvantages: Not for those researching the finer points of jet engine development, or the peasants' revolt.
The year 2000 seems to be the year of .co.uk pay-per-click search engines. Godado was the first to launch a UK site so it would make sense to start with them, besides which no one else seems to have reviewed this one.
I have to own up to a certain scepticism about the viability of search engines that nakedly charge sites (their "advertisers"), to be listed at or near the top of a set of results. It seems to go against my admittedly vague notions of what the WWW is all about: providing information for the love of it; a conduit for the free exchange of ideas; empowering the whole community through dissemination of information ? etc, etc. I suppose it is inevitable that anything this big will increasingly succumb commercial forces, particularly if it allows business to get more directly to the consumer.
Anyway, things are rarely as they seem in the search engine world. It would appear not only from reviews on this site -but also from the increasing press interest in search engines/directories- that most of the big names have some sort of veiled system of payments, that can guarantee a higher position in their results. Godado maintains that at least their process is open, everyone can see who is bidding to be listed near or at the top of a result list.
To clarify then, the system is based on the "advertisers" bidding for the keywords that they think searchers may use when looking for their product or service. Let?s take the example of "jobs", a search on this keyword produced the following sites in the top five:
1) jobsite.co.uk / pays 0.11p for the word "jobs";
2) thecvdoctor.com / pays 0.10p ditto;
3) jobpilot.co.uk / pays 0.05p ditto;
4) preloved.co.uk / pays 0.04p ditto;
5) jobworld.co.uk / pays 0.02p ditto.
The system is reckoned to be of benefit to both the business and the consumer.
The business can precisely target its product/service by the use
of keywords, and determine how much they are prepared to pay to do this. So to take the first result from above: jobsite.co.uk will pay Godado 11p every time a search on the keyword "jobs" results in a click through to their site. This would seem to make perfect sense if it's true that successful marketing of online product/services is all about targeting, and not about plastering the tube with posters or spending hundreds of thousands on TV ads. Why pay for X number of banner ad. impressions when instead, you can pay only on delivery of a potential customer to your site?
From the consumer point of view; there is the knowledge that the sites listed, at the top of a set of results, will have been vetted to ensure their relevance to the keyword being searched on. As, for this system to work it would seem that there has to be a large degree of editorial control. To survive the search engine must ensure that users keep coming back because each time they quickly find what they're looking for. Presumably many sites would want to list every keyword under the sun to maximise the chances of a click-through. The search engine must ensure that they are only allowed to bid for words that are directly relevant to them, or risk letting irrelevant results lead to dissatisfied users.
As such I would question the listing in the above results of thecvdoctor.com, an online C.V. service. The relationship is obvious, but I don't believe someone looking for such a service would simply search on the word "jobs". The search engine editors will have to balance very carefully the need to keep their advertisers happy with lots of click throughs, against the need to keep the user happy with carefully targeted results. What is the point of pay-per-click search engines if they can't provide only the most relevant results?
For the reasons above I'm inclined to believe that pay-per-click search engines, such as Godado, will thr
ive, as sites cotton on to the potential of bidding for keywords as a very targeted form of marketing.
At present Godado uses the reliable meta search engine Mamma.com to provide the results that appear under the lowest bidder for a keyword or where a keyword is not being bid for at all.
For users it would seem that Godado and its peers are useful tools for anyone wanting to partake in ecommerce, but will be of limited value as tools to find the majority of non-commercial sites that exist simply for the love of providing informative content.
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