On July 22, CNET news announced that AltaVista has discontinued it's experiment with Paid Ranking Results.

Controversial Move by AltaVista

When the announcement was made in April that AltaVista was going to be auctioning off keywords, there was a wave of dissent that this practive ran against the principles of the Internet. AltaVista tried to counter the controversy by clearly indicating that the results were paid results. Initially, these were in a box at the top of the page. In the past few weeks, this box was moved to the bottom of the page, in a move that was probably the sign that the project was doomed to an early demise.

No Comment from AltaVista

The CNET story mentioned that AltaVista wasn't commenting, but said this message appeared somewhere on their site (we looked for it, but couldn't find it):

"The Relevant Paid Links Program has been discontinued as of July 22, 1999. No more keyword bids are being accepted. If you have previously placed a bid and won a placement during the week of July 6 to 13, your relevant link will still run, during the week of July 19 to 26, without charge. If you have placed bids after July 13, your relevant link will not run and, subsequently, there will be no charge."

What Happened?

While we can only speculate on the reasons, we suspect AltaVista had a backlash from their users, prompting them to move the results to the bottom of the page. This would have resulted (understandably) in upset advertisers saying they weren't getting what they were paying for. From here, it would have been a short, swift spiral downwards. The recent change of ownership at AltaVista (it was recently purchased from Compaq by Net investment firm CMGI) may have had something to do with it.

What This Means for the Web

In our original article, we had said that other search engines would be carefully watching AltaVista to see what happened with this experiment. With the quick demise of the program, it's safe to bet that other search engines will be very hesitant about following in AltaVista's footsteps. For the near future, I would predict that the major search engines will keep very clear distinctions between their search results and paid advertising.

Further Resources - Other Articles

AltaVista Ends Paid Search Practice
CNET News, July 22, 1999