The search engine landscape is changing again.  As we have pointed out in the past,  the search engines and directories are moving more and more to payment for listings and rankings.  Where this stops or how far it will go in the industry is yet to be seen.  We feel that it will never get to 100% paid inclusion and rankings but then again we are not fortune tellers.  

Inktomi's paid inclusion program has only recently gone live through a partnership announced in September with MediaDNA and another announced just this week with Position Technologies.  The program will evolve as the program matures and as new partners are announced. 

Basically, paid inclusion with the Inktomi search engine means that web site owners pay to be guaranteed that the web pages they select are included in its search engine crawler-based listings and that these pages will be re-indexed every 48 hours. 

That is where the promises stop.  There is no assurance that web pages will appear highly ranked for any particular search.

Because Inktomi crawls the web to find web pages, its pay for inclusion model is potentially more worrisome to searchers than the ones run by Yahoo and DMOZ.   Human-powered directories, by their very nature, have never been inclusive of everything on the web. That's why major search sites using directory information typically supplement their search results with crawler-based databases results. If the human editors haven't categorized something, then the crawler provides a back-up. Consequently,  many Internet users expect a crawler to be all inclusive.  That isn't close to being true and never will be.   However, things in the search engine world change every day and it is hard to predict exactly what will happen in the future.  You just have to stay tuned and aware of the changes.  

So what is going to happen with the Inktomi program over time? Will they sell out the "deep" crawled data to ensure prime ranking for paid inclusion web site owners so more people will pay for inclusion?  Will they ultimately give paid inclusion sites ranking preference?    Inktomi says no.  Paid inclusion is mainly a way it sees for site owners to share the cost of getting people to their content.  Additionally, they think this will help increase the robustness of their database by including new content that is difficult to crawl or find.  In that sense, they see paid inclusion as a supplement to there crawler data.  

"We're going to continue crawling the web much as we have, using the same kind of popularity analysis to build the bulk of our index," said Troy Toman, general manager of Inktomi's search solutions division. "We're not on a path where we'll say were going to remove every site in our index unless they pay. It's really to go more after sites that would wish to be better represented in our index or people who want more timely information from their site made available."

Others are jumping on the bandwagon, Go says it is readying a paid inclusion system with its own spidered results that may be unveiled in December.

Google has started listing paid keyword placements but has no plans for a paid inclusion system.  (For now that is.)  "I think there are some significant philosophical issues," said Google president Sergey Brin. "If someone searches for cancer, and there's a really good cancer site out there, what if you don't have the answer they are looking for because that particular site didn't pay to be in there." (But will the almighty dollar win out in the end?)

AltaVista is still determining what services it intends to market to webmasters. Paid inclusion could be one of these.  They are kicking around other ideas like allowing web site owners to enhance their listings with highlighting or even pictures.

Paid inclusion is not all bad.   They can help unlock the "invisible" web by making content that's currently unreachable to spiders, such as locked in databases or behind firewalls, attainable and searchable.  

The jury is still out on the ultimate impact on search results of paid inclusion programs.  They may impact the quality and relevancy of database search results (maybe even the depth) but this will probably have less of an impact then paid rankings.   We will have to see if the search engines and directories can keep these paid inclusion programs from harming the integrity and robustness of their results.