Paid Inclusion Being Dropped by AskJeeves

Ask Jeeves announced that it will drop its Index paid inclusion XML feed program due to concern over how the paid inclusion data affected its search engine's relevance and because the initiative wasn't paying off as expected.

According to Jim Lanzone, vide president of product management, the company found that -after much testing -paid inclusion can negatively sway search results.

"We're never going to mix church and state again," Lanzone said.

This move by AskJeeves comes at the same time Yahoo has debuted its own paid-inclusion service, Site Match. The debut was met with some concern and speculation, but Tim Cadogan, Yahoo's vice president of Web search, said Yahoo's commercial relationships with paid-inclusion customer will not influence its search results. But it will keep an "iron wall" between those relationships and the billions of Web documents it indexes regularly.

Google continues its steadfast stance on not taking payment to be included in its index.

"User trust is the number one thing that we focus on," said Tim Armstrong, vice president of advertising for Google. "The premise that we have stuck with from the start is that user trust is the most important component of our business."

Many view paid-inclusion and XML feeds as a way for the search engines to tap into the "invisible" or "deep" Web. Yahoo is partnering with non-profit organizations for is new XML feed program, including NPR and the Library of Congress, which will provide Yahoo with data feeds about their pages for free.

Ask Jeeves will continue to offer its Site Submit program. Smaller advertisers pay a flat fee to submit their URLS to be crawled, however, inclusion is not guaranteed.