AltaVista Latest To Carry GoTo Paid Listings

By Danny Sullivan , December 4, 2000

AltaVista Latest To Carry GoTo Paid Listings

By Danny Sullivan
Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com
Updated: Dec. 4, 2000

AltaVista began carrying paid links provided by GoTo.com in November, making it the latest major search engine to be co-opted by the paid placement service.

GoTo currently has paid links appearing live at Netscape Search and AOL Search, and they should appear at Lycos and HotBot within the next two weeks, GoTo says.

Three GoTo paid links are to appear in a "Sponsored Listings" section that will appear at the bottom of AltaVista's search results page. In addition, AltaVista is also carrying five links "above the fold" or at the very top of the branded listings it provides to those using its free internet access service, reaching the site through the Compaq keyboard link and other means.

The deal firmly establishes GoTo as a premier provider of paid listings to major search engines. It has also made the ability for site owners to "buy their way to the top" widely possible for the first time in the search engine market.

At the beginning of this year, none of the top ten most popular search engines had any type of paid placement program. Now, four of them do (AOL Search, AltaVista, Lycos, Netscape Search). The remaining six (Excite, Go, iWon, MSN Search, NBCi, Yahoo), still do not, but that's likely to change. (NBCi does carry paid listings, but not as prominently as the four previously named).

The numbers are even more dramatic when you go to the top fifteen search engines. Of these, 60 percent have a prominent paid links program. GoTo powers six of the programs, while the three others run their own, as shown on the chart below. (If metacrawlers were included, GoTo would have an even bigger presence.)

More background on GoTo's other partnerships and paid listings in general can be found on the "Pay For Placement" page below.

Pay For Placement?
http://searchenginewatch.com/resources/paid-listings.html

AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com/

AltaVista Branded Results
http://listings.altavista.com/

You can see how the top five GoTo results have been integrated into this version of AltaVista distributed through some of its partners. Implementation on the main site will be different.

GoTo
http://www.goto.com/