... At goto.com the top-most listings are in order of how much each company was prepared to pay for EACH click on their listing.
As a result, a company will carefully select the search words that most apply to their product. After all, if lots of people click, but are not interested in buying ... Read review
Advantages: Less irrelevant listings in commercial categories than almost any other search engine. Disadvantages: Non commercial stuff is just the same Inktomi database you find in many other search engines.
...up with cash. At goto.com the top-most listings are in order of how much each company was prepared to pay for EACH click on their listing.
As a result, a company will carefully select the search words that most apply to their product. After all, if lots of people click, but are not interested in buying then the company is actually going to lose a lot of money.
Of course, for quite a lot of searches there isn't really ... ...many more, sites are not selling anything that has a large profit margin, so they can only afford to pay, at most, a few pence for each click.
For those kinds of results, Goto also provides ordinary search results, which are listed right after any of the paid bids are listed. Those search results come from a commercial search engine database provided by Inktomi.
You may not know the name, but if you have used many search ... more
Goto created a totally unique way to decide which sites were most relevant to a query. They let the companies behind the sites decide, but make them back it up with cash. At goto.com the top-most listings are in order of how much each company was prepared to pay for EACH click on their listing.
As a result, a company will carefully select the search words that most apply to their product. After all, if lots of people click, but are not interested in buying then the company is actually going to lose a lot of money.
Of course, for quite a lot of searches there isn't really a 'product' or service to sell that relates. For many more, sites are not selling anything that has a large profit margin, so they can only afford to pay, at most, a few pence for each click.
For those kinds of results, Goto also provides ordinary search results, which are listed right after any of the paid bids are listed. Those search results come from a commercial search engine database provided by Inktomi.
You may not know the name, but if you have used many search engines before, you'll already have used the inktomi database. Other search engines that use the Inktomi database include MSN, AOL, Looksmart and Hotbot. In fact, around half of the search engines out there use the Inktomi database - which shows that they have a pretty good reputation.
When you search at Goto, you are getting results from the Inktomi database, but with listings from Goto's own database provided first. You'll see EXACTLY the same results if you search at Freeserve.com too.
I work with search engines for my living. I don't create search engines, but I do research a lot of information by using them. I also depend on them in a way, because I am a professional in Internet Marketing, one aspect of which is to ensure that my clients and employers are well listed on appropriate searches.
That aspect of what I do is sometimes a career in its own right, called SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. Not everyone in the industry is as careful as I am to ensure that all the listings are truly relevant to the searcher. This is the real reason that many engines return such irrelevant listings sometimes: a 'bad' SEO professional has deliberately fooled the search engine into ranking the pages highly for those search words.
Hell, they don't pay for the clicks do they, so what do they care. Sure, it messes with your real search, but, heck, maybe one in a thousand of you will be interested in their site instead, they think.
This is the great thing about Goto. The one thing that beats all else. That doesn't happen so much at Goto because there they DO have to pay for the clicks. You can be pretty sure that once the companies and webmasters have to pay cash every time someone clicks on their listing that they'll want to be certain that you are really likely to be interested in what they are selling.
In fact, when Goto first announced their model, most of the other search engine companies sneered at them. Now however, the results have proved so successful that the top search engines include the goto data in their own results. This includes search engines such as AltaVista, MSN, Netscape, AOL, iWon, AskJeeves, Excite, and many others too.
If their rivals, experts who most understand about the importance of providing good results in creating customer loyalty, have decided they have faith in Goto, then maybe Goto really did create a unique twist on the way to ensure results of searches are good ones.
Rivals certainly were swift to copy Goto in this model, with Findwhat, Sprinks and Kanoodle in the US, and with Espotting and Mirago in Europe following Goto's shining lead.
Hopefully, you too may decide to give Goto's idea a fair evaluation, and not allow prejudice against commercialism to stop you really seeing what Goto can do.
For non-commercial stuff, I still prefer Google, because it has a far larger database to draw results from. But when I'm looking for something commercial, like banks, shops or services, Goto is actually very good indeed.
Advantages: commercial portal. Disadvantages: unreliable results, pay to list.
GoTO is a great search engine for certain things and a terrible one for others. This review should help you make best use of it.
Goto requires sites listed to pay for their position on the search results (nots for site promoters later). As a result, you will only find commercial sites on this engine. Furthermore, sites owners chose the keywords that will pick them up in a search. Many of these are not used acuratly - for example of you type in "search ... ...placement, rather than a list of search engines. It is a good place to start if you want to shop, but it takes a while to get a hang of using keyowrds to best effect - this engine does not work in quite the same way as most others.
One definite plus from certain perspectives is that you don't get as many random bits of sites (all those shopping carts and stuff the google puts up) Resluts tend to be focused, altough not necessarily focused in the ...
Bryn_Pearson 24.05.2001
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of goto.com
...web master/marketing point of view, GOTO.com is a saviour. The arbitrary nature of the majority of search engines makes GoTo.com a welcome change and a necessary evil.
First you have to understand that GoTo.com is a search engine that auctions off the top positions of keyword search results to the highest bidder. So if you search "dog drool" the first results you will see will be those of companies or webmasters who have bid to have their site appear ... ...Spot" is obliged to pay GoTo.com $1.32 for the service of "delivering" you to their site. Now if "Wet Spot" has something to sell, from a marketing point of view it may very well be worth his while to pay $1.32 to have you visit his site. After all you initiated the search so therefor have identified yourself as someone with an interest in the topic of "Dog Drool." Now "Spot" just has to deliver some content that is worthwhile to you and perhaps ...
NATALIA70 30.08.2001
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of goto.com
Advantages: Not many Disadvantages: Commercialising the web
Services like Goto are in danger of totally ruining the web. This search engine works, not by relevence, but by how much web site owners pay to have their site included. Try it for yourself with a search word like 'Yahoo'. You would expect to find Yahoo.com at least in the top 10 right? Not with Goto you won't, but you will find 10 irrelevant sites that have paid for the 'yahoo' keyword. This type of search engine will eventually kill off the non-profit ...
Lad 23.07.2000
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of goto.com
Advantages: Popular. Seems to have good coverage of Asian web sites Disadvantages: Not as quick as some
I use many search engines but being based in Malaysia and often searching for web sites in Singapore,Malaysia,Japan and Australia as well as UK and US,I tend to rely quite heavily on goto.com.I find its coverage of sites in these countries is good and superior to that of several other major search engines. Of course each of the major search engines have their pros and cons and sometimes there are advantages in using the meta search engines such as ...
ashford 08.07.2000
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful Review of goto.com
Advantages: Original Disadvantages: another search engine
Goto.com has a lot of new lists, many could not be found in Yahoo. Goto.com's homepage however seems to be a bit monotonous. At first sight it may not be obvious that Goto.com is another search engine. The filing system look makes it easy to figure out where you are going to, eg. the Search, the Shopping and the Auctions. The homepage for the Search is good since I get an overview of what I am looking at without having to scroll down to see what ...
MarketWatcher 28.07.2000
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful Review of goto.com
