That’s a far cry from what you need to do today. So what happened?

In my opinion: Money. Or rather, lack of money.

It didn’t take much money to run the search engines in the early days of the Net. But, there was not a few 100 million websites to index then. And, there were not millions of people doing multiple searches every day.

This all adds up to extra costs for the search engines. Lots of extra costs. Most of these costs used to be offset by selling extras for your listing and by banner ads. People are still buying little extras, but as marketers, you know what’s happened with banner ads. The click-through ratio has been steadily going down.

That has resulted in reduced revenues for the search engines when compared to increased use. So, they started adding affiliate links. You know the ones. You do a search on ‘widgets’ and along with the results are links to Amazon.com with the text, “find books about widgets.”

There are also pop-ups, pop-unders, and anything else that can generate extra income for the search engines. But, these are annoying. Probably, most people close this extra window without even looking at them.

So, the search engines, according to all reports, are going broke. Infoseek all but went away. Excite was sold. Rumors at the end of last year were that Yahoo was near bankruptcy. So, what’s a search engine to do?

Start charging for services.

There have been for a while now several pay-per-click search engines. Ones where you bid on key words. If you are among the high bidders then your site is displayed when the keyword is searched for. In other words, you pay for you position with the search engine.

Some search engines have completely stopped taking new listings. Others have begun to charge for new listings. As this practice becomes more accepted look for the other search engines to charge for their listings, too.

What does the future hold for search engines?

In my opinion, the free services will all but disappear.

You will have to pay a fee to get your site listed. You already do on some of them. And get used to the idea of that fee becoming an annual fee. On top of that, the backlog is so bad on some of the search engines; it takes months to be listed. So, there will probably be extra fees you can pay for ‘express’ service. Yahoo has charged this type of fee for years, with no guarantee of your site even being listed.

You may even have to pay a fee to do searches. If millions of people a day, do multiple searches on a single search engine, that’s a tremendous amount of bandwidth. A usage fee would help pay for this bandwidth.

Is this a rip-off ?

No.

This is what the telephone company has done for years. If you have a business, you don’t get a free listing in the yellow pages. If you want your ad in bold type, or in color, there’s an additional charge. If you want pictures, or a display ad, you pay even more.

You need to find a phone number? Information is no longer free. You may get a few free numbers each month, but then you start paying to get numbers. And, for an extra fee, they’ll dial it for you.

On top of that, the phone companies are bundling a bunch of extra services together. For an extra monthly fee, you get these extra services. Even if you don’t use them very much, you will still pay for them.

So should we be upset at what’s happening at the search engines. Not really. This has been inevitable for a long time. We’ve had a free ride for a long time. But, for the search engines to survive, they must have income.

If they go broke and cease to exist, we will be spending a great deal of money to replace the hits. So, it’s probably going to be a good deal for us in the long run. In the meantime, until we get use to it, we’re just going to have to put up with it.

One other thing you will probably see is the restriction of what sites can be listed at all. Yahoo has done this for many years. Others will not take sites with a “?” or other special character that label it as a replicated or affiliate web site. Some search engines will only accept listings of sites that end in with a “/” indicating that you have at least a directory of your own. Already, there are search engines that only accept listings from a root domain (www.yourdomain.com).

What will this be in the future? My take on the situation is that eventually you will need your own domain to get a listing. A move like this will keep many millions of replicated pages from clogging up the databases, and bring down operating costs.