In: Search Industry Gains Clout, Susan Kuchinskas reports on Danny’s keynote address at SES.
One big change in 2004 was the drop in paid inclusions by most major search engines in natural search results, Sullivan said. Now, only Yahoo shows links to companies that have paid for the privilege in its search results pages. But paid inclusion will be important in vertical search services. “There are good reasons for paid inclusion,” Sullivan said. For example, online yellow pages can be very useful for searchers and they’re based on paid listings. Audio and video search and shopping will be much more likely to offer a paid inclusion option to advertisers, and it will be seen as acceptable in vertical searches.