 8 pages
Download PDF >> Read HTML Version >> |
In the early days of the Web, you pretty much needed to know where you were going (i.e., your destination’s URL) to get anywhere at all useful. If you were lucky, you might happen onto one of the few “portal” sites with links to lots of other sites; and then you could engage in the quaint practice of “surfing”, or simply following a chain of links that seemed interesting. If you were trying to do serious research, this was akin to going to a library prior to the development of the Dewey Decimal System; there was some chance that what you needed was in there somewhere, but your odds of finding it were fairly remote. (Truth be told, there also wasn’t much chance that what you needed was even “in there”; there just wasn’t yet that much content of value on the Web in those days.) As the Web matured and vast amounts of content began to be deployed on it, the need for a means of efficiently searching through all that content became obvious to a number of companies, including Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite and Hotbot. Collectively, they pioneered the search engine industry; later, they were joined by “second-generation” providers such as Google and AskJeeves. Under the pay per click model, the advertiser indicates willingness to pay for the display of a priority or “sponsored” listing in response to a user’s search on a particular set of keywords, simply by establishing a “bid” price with the search engine on those keywords. A user launching a search using those keywords will see the advertiser’s listing displayed in premium real estate: highlighted at either the top or right-hand side of the search-results page, regardless of where the site would normally land by “organic” or natural means. If the user actually clicks on the sponsored ad (thereby hitting the advertiser’s website), then and only then does the advertiser pay for that instance of running the ad. That charge can not exceed the advertiser’s maximum bid price ...and may actually be substantially less ... Download PDF >> Read HTML Version >> |