tollbooths on the internet
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Posted on Feb 22, 2006 07:48 pm
fortymile
Member Since: Jan 18, 2003
saw another article recently about web sites getting ranking priority with ISPs, or something, if they pay. or paying for bandwidth or something. anyone seen any articles on this? i cant find one right now, but my god, what a retarded idea. i know now how some must have felt right before the american revolution. this cannot stand. a free internet is essential. the internet is too important a resource. we cant go that way. what is being done to prevent this?
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TadpuiI am not a crook's headMember
Since: Mar 14, 2003
Feb 22, 2006 08:10 pm I think that web pages have been paying for search engine rankings for a while now. I agree that its pretty bad form. Google seems to have a neat way of doing it without affecting the other sites' ranks. They have the special section at the top of your results that are "featured sites", but at least they're seperate from the rest of the results.
Feb 22, 2006 08:18 pm Why is that wrong to pay for search engine ranking? It's no different than paying for ad space in a magazine, paying for a billboard or paying for a TV or radio commercial. Now, if one could pay to keep another site offline or way low in the rankings, now THAT would be wrong.
The internet and internet marketing is a businessplace like any other.
zekthedeadcowEat Spam before it eats YOU!!!Member
Since: May 11, 2002
Feb 22, 2006 09:27 pm I suppose it all depends how many Erics are involved...
there is no conspiracy...
SPOON!
lucky13Your mom's favorite sonMember
Since: Feb 07, 2006
Feb 23, 2006 11:11 am The company I work for pays a lot of good money to be first on certain search engine key words. This is an essential part of our marketing. Any other company can outbid us if they want to, and have their name first. Plus, it's not like the people not paying are excluded, they're just farther down the line.
TadpuiI am not a crook's headMember
Since: Mar 14, 2003
Feb 23, 2006 11:27 am Yeah but part of the lure of the internet is that Joe Schmoe can put up a site he made in his living room and get equal exposure as a giant conglomerate. Now its just another medium where the little guy gets squeezed out by big-budget outfits.
Advertising and marketing are fine with me, but being able to buy search rankings sucks IMO. When I search, I want to find something that closely matches my query, not something that remotely resembles my query but is run by somebody with deep pockets.
But like I said, I like how Google handles it, by having a seperate section of premium sites or featured sites.
Feb 23, 2006 11:37 am If the little guy bothers to study and learn, he can get pretty high rankings too...HRC doesn't pay for rankings, but I beat lots of other sites, including online music stores and such. The little guy CAN succeed, but like with any business and any marketing, it's a knowledge and creativity vs. capital investment ratio...the less you have of one means you better have more of the other.
Somebody runs search engines, and they have to make money too, internet advertising isn't the gold mine it was a few years back so the best the search engines can do is two things, make money by people paying for rankings, and hope to create the most accurate, relevent organic results possible to make sure they are the most used since they have the best results. In theory, those that pay for keywords WILL be very relevent results as well, since the business is the one targetting the keywords, they don't want to waste their money on wasteful keywords.
One could argue it makes for more relevent results.
As a business, to rely on any marketing for free is foolish.
Feb 23, 2006 01:59 pm Ya know something I have found funny (in an ironic way) is that on Google, for example, those sponsor links boxes on the right hand side of the screen actually get far fewer clicks than listings in the main, organic results. User studies have shown time and time again, the upper left hand corner is the place to be with the top few getting the click, upper right often times isn't even paid attention to...
The rub is that while the click through ratio may be lower, the impressions are still much higher so the totall number of clickthrus is still better.
Feb 23, 2006 02:20 pm Yeah, a search engine can do whatever they want. It's an individual business and you don't have to use its services if you don't want to. The Internet isn't free. You have to pay for web space, domain names, bandwidth, etc, etc.
For a while we didn't even have all of these search engines. If you wanted to find a site, you had to hear about it somewhere else. Nobody complained. It's not like we're entitled to free search engines.
I think the reason why nobody clicks on those paid Google search results is because they're always useless, and their services are usually charging money for things that you can get elsewhere on the net for free...
Feb 23, 2006 02:27 pm Therein lies a lot of the problem, many people are still in the pre-bubble-burst frame of mind. Before the bubble burst, everything online was free, hell, there was free web space, free web building tools, even free internet access, because at the beginning all you needed was a web site and a clever idea (not even that clever really) and you stood the chance of getting stupidly wealthy due to stupid investors getting caught up in the hype of the internet.
After the bubble burst in early 2000's that all started going away. I haven't seen a free ISP in a long time, free web space is so ad-cluttered it sucks, etc, etc...
But, it does appear that people are more and more coming out of that "everything should be free" attitude that was developed in the late 90's. Also legitimate web businesses perservered and even triumphed (Google being a good example) whereas the wanna be's or intangible web businesses started going away.
The bubble burst was a good thing in the long run, it made the internet just another normal marketing and informational tool instead of the magical place of free everything it was made out to be back in the day...
flame...bringing sexy backMember
Since: Jul 01, 2002
Feb 23, 2006 02:41 pm theres a company here that gives you free 'net access if youve got one of their phone lines (which a lot of houses have). thing is, its dial up only, and it cuts you off after 2 hours
Feb 23, 2006 05:00 pm As Mr dB Masters says, the little guys (like us) have number one search engine rankings, and paid the sum total of ZILCHO!
My sites are all at number one and thats down to 2 weeks proper keyword research, a rewrite of the meta tags and some shet hot advice from none other than Mr dB Masters...now, most ALL my sites rank NUMBER ONE on Google and Yahoo amoungst others....
And PROUD I am...
So, it can be done...fear not.
Coco.
Noize2uCzar of MidiAdministrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002
Feb 23, 2006 09:59 pm Ya, the free internet. 2 million BBS sites that had pages looking like an old DOS screen, and 100 good sites with actual content.
Oh wait, that was the dark ages of the internet. :-)
As for the Google paid adds on the right. I only look there if I dont see what I want in the first page of regular listings. There have been a few times it actually had what I wanted. But I do mean only a few!
Feb 24, 2006 01:46 am im not talking about prioritized ranking in a little section at the top of the page.
thats fine. have you not heard the news about what the ISPs are trying to make happen next? i wish i could find the article but it is very bad.
it will basically kill the internet as we know it. it is very, very evil. pay attention to the mags and papers in coming months. if i find the article, ill post it.
LokiCone PokerMember
Since: Apr 07, 2002
Feb 24, 2006 02:35 am The internet does not exist. it's a hallucination caused by the drugs the illuminati puts in what we think is our coffee. You don't want to know what you're really drinking.
I'm going to dissapear now...
Feb 24, 2006 06:31 am Hey, where did Loki go?!
zekthedeadcowEat Spam before it eats YOU!!!Member
Since: May 11, 2002
Feb 24, 2006 10:13 am The only thing on the internet that matters is content and users... most of the content is either porn or FTP ... most users don't care what mechanism is used to get them to the content. If suddenly porn and FTP sites make a mass exodus from the web to a seperate network... guess where the users are going to go. FTP sites need cheap bandwidth because they use a lot... it's not hard for one user to use 1GB on one download... if suddenly you have to dial into a cell network to download linux people are going to do it and then a company will form to offer competitive access plans and the web starts all over again.
It's simply too easy to start a network and with wireless technology reletivly inexpensive to cover a large area. Infact many cities offer free wireless access downtown.... even if it's accidental :)
Feb 24, 2006 10:15 am I hope forty can find the article, cuz I'd like to read it, since the internet sorta is my career and all, I read lots of trade mags and keep current and have heard nothing that alarms like it seems forty is alarmed...
Feb 24, 2006 01:42 pm what zek is saying about networks migrating--people taking thier stuff with them to 'undernets' and stuff like that, and attracting people to freer pastures-- was the first thought that came to me when i heard about this.
but then i realized that these changes, if they happen, will occur at the level of the ISP, restricting the content thats actually deliverable through the existing physical network, all based on which companies pay the most. this would effectively be ushering the internet into a totally corporate world, where no one can play unless they pay.
i scanned the article while drunk. i might be making wrong assumptions. im not very knowledgable about this stuff. but it seems to me that if the owners of the physical structures that pipe in content are the ones making the changes, then there is nothing that could be done, no way around. or am i wrong?
ill look for the article tonight.
Feb 24, 2006 01:48 pm Ahhhh, OK, I know what you are saying. Well, I read similar stuff about that, and, depending how much control is taken by the ISP, I don't really mind much, as they are protecting themselves...but thats a big "depending".
I understand, given the RIAA strongarming ISP, video music and porn video clogging networks, P2P file sharing legal battles and everything else involved, I can see an ISP restricting such content at times.
Now, I don't think it's cool to have happen, but I can see how an ISP might do this for their own protection and the protection of their network stability and bandwidth. What I can see happening is many ISP's offering "high bandwidth" options for people that stream a lot of porn...er, I mean video...in other words, make the people that use it, pay for it...or make the monthly bill based on bandwidth used.
Feb 24, 2006 01:54 pm i just wouldnt want to have every site available to me be a 'megastore.' i need to be able to find information in weird places. when i was a researcher with a publishing company, i had to troll through the most backwater sites to find a single fact.
i wasnt talking about files but just simple web pages and information resources. i would hope that tiny sites would still be searchable and reachable.
Feb 24, 2006 01:58 pm Oh, I totally see your point there. Most of what I have read regarding ISP totalitarianism has been around bandwidth and legal issues not "censorship" type of stuff.
zekthedeadcowEat Spam before it eats YOU!!!Member
Since: May 11, 2002
Feb 24, 2006 04:36 pm I don't like being billed on bandwidth used because I never really know what it will be... and I hate it when a website is shut off because it used it's monthy bandwidth quota by the 5th of the month...
Many boradband ISP's now give you a small pipe and say do what you want... the users may have slow dowenloads but access is never "prevented"... and if you pay for the commercial service you get a bigger pipe....and more importantly to the server owner is they are never supprised with a $1K access bill for a personal webpage that suddenly becomes popular for whatever reason.
Noize2uCzar of MidiAdministrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002
Feb 24, 2006 11:48 pm Hey zek, is boradband something new? Is it faster the broadband?
zekthedeadcowEat Spam before it eats YOU!!!Member
Since: May 11, 2002
Feb 25, 2006 11:32 am yes :)
zekthedeadcowEat Spam before it eats YOU!!!Member
Since: May 11, 2002
Feb 25, 2006 07:22 pm hmm... well that is pretty much how it works... us small sites don't have the same throughput as ebay or google because we don't need it... and those higher access charges have always cost alot... I think I'm limited to 1.5MBps download and 384KBps upload... so if I max out my user load at 512 simultaneous users it could get pretty slow...
but limited throughput doesn't prevent access and doesn't effect search rankings... it just pisses off users if you have a popular site... but large sites arn't being hosted on single connections on single servers that cost less that a house.
I think the author of that article thinks ebay or google is an operation that can be run out of a garage with an extra phoneline... though you can do a lot with a single ipaddress and a PC running linux... there are somethings you just don't walk into CompUSA and buy. :)
...and bear in mind that article was written as an editorial and not an article... so it doesn't count as journalism.
Feb 25, 2006 07:47 pm "but limited throughput doesn't prevent access and doesn't effect search rankings"
--good.
"...and bear in mind that article was written as an editorial and not an article... so it doesn't count as journalism."
--facts are always distinguishable from opinions, even in opinion pieces. there is information in this article. for some reason when i read it the first time, i came away concluding that rankings and availability would be affected. in one sense, they could be, i suppose: an upstart website becomes very popular, and 'clogged' because it has little bandwidth available to it under the new proposed rules. the site, inaccessible to users now, never takes off, thus never gaining the capital it would need to purchase access to another tier. the site goes under as people lose interest in the site due to its lack of speed, stability, and quality.
Feb 28, 2006 02:47 am www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/int...y.ap/index.html
"The next great idea, the next Google or eBay or Napster or whatever, won't have the capital to get themselves in the fast lanes right away," said Ben Scott at Free Press, a nonprofit that promotes freedom of speech. "The reason the big e-companies were so successful were that they started on the same level playing field as everyone else."
zekthedeadcowEat Spam before it eats YOU!!!Member
Since: May 11, 2002
Feb 28, 2006 10:45 am basically to sum up my point:
internet+level playing field=myth
organizations always paid or the best access... I suppose one change is that when a lot of these companies started there were no fast lanes.
Feb 28, 2006 06:40 pm the point about a potential google or ebay or napster makes a lot of sense to me. when youre just starting out, you need your incoming capital to invest further in yourself. pay for access instead--especially based on traffic--and your growth will naturally be limited. the more users you attract, the more you pay. it would be a natural limiting mechanism on growth.
