goto.com

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 ... more

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 engine" you get a list of sites selling search engine placement, rather than a list of search engines. It is a good place to start if you want ... more

This is the second of a serie of ops I intend to write on search engines. ...if you need to get your site listed prominently and you are a hero of capitalism. From a 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 ... more

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 websites. Big corporations will be the only ones that can afford to be listed in the search engines. I urge you not to use Goto. ... more

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 alltheweb.com. However, if I am looking for say,e zines in Australia, I will often resort to using goto.com. Overall I find for my purposes this is ... more