First Monday
What Next for Internet Journals? Implications of the Trend Towards Paid Placement in Search Engines by Robin Henshaw

Abstract
Free online journals have long had a difficult time surviving on the Internet. One method of article discovery for these publications has been through the use of Internet search engines. Will these journals and other non-profit organizations be lost in the Internet's black hole with the advent of paid placement, inclusion, and submission?

Contents

Brief History of Internet Journals
Brief History of Search Engines and the Problems of Finding Information on the Internet
The Move Toward Paid Placement
Ways To Advertise In Search Services
Search Engine Offerings
What's Next for Internet Journals and Others Who Can't Pay?
Conclusion

 

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Brief History of Internet Journals

In September 1991 a new journal was announced. The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials was to be the world's first online peer-reviewed journal (Palca, 1991). This experiment was a joint venture of the American Association for the Advancement of Science ( AAAS) and OCLC Online Computer Library Center. While it was still too early for the journal to be made available over the Internet, the software that allowed access was made available to subscribers willing to pay a $US110 subscription price. Subscribers also needed access to a top of the line computer, which at the time was a 286 or higher IBM-compatible, with 2 MB of memory and Windows 3.0 (Palca, 1991). The journal was revolutionary, as its publishing was to be wholly electronic - manuscripts would be submitted, peer-reviewed, and edited without ever being printed. Many were skeptical that the journal would not be able meet its stated objective of speeding up the peer-review process to make scientific findings available sooner in order to help critically ill patients.

This and a handful of other academic e-journal titles were the only ones available through the developing new networks (Okerson, 2000). Their formats were plain ASCII text with no graphics, foreign characters, bolding, or italicizing. In 1991 there were only 27 e-journals and magazines, according to NewJour, a New Journal and Newsletter Announcement List for new serials on the Internet ( http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/NewJourWel.html). The online publishing industry really began to grow in 1994 and 1995, when the number of titles in NewJour's directory grew to 306. A visit to their Web site in 2001 reveals over 10,000 journals and newsletters. This number represents those that have always been electronic, as well as paper journals who have moved into the electronic arena.

In May 1996, the first issue of First Monday appeared on the Internet. After 61 issues, the peer-reviewed journal is a continuing example that not only can a peer-reviewed journal be published exclusively online, but that it can also draw distinguished authors from throughout the world, and be made available free of charge to readers. Since its debut, 295 papers by 355 different authors, as well as reviews and interviews, have been published (as of August 2001). These papers have been accessed by over 300,000 hosts using the Internet from 160 countries (Henshaw and Valauskas, 2001). Readers of First Monday have used a variety of ways to find the journal; see Table 1 below. Obviously, if 80% of Internet users (Precision Marketing, 2001) turn to a search engine to find the information they need, one can assume that search engines are playing some role in driving traffic to the First Monday Web site.

 

Table 1: First 10 Referring Sites to First Monday, July, 2001 issue
by number of requests.
Number of Requests
Site
635,576
http://www.firstmonday.dk
131,372
http://firstmonday.org
97,902
http://www.firstmonday.org
22,427
http://www.google.com
10,804
http://firstmonday.dk
5,250
http://old.law.columbia.edu
4,937
http://google.yahoo.com
3,406
http://www.bearshare.com
2,221
http://www.c-4-u.com
40,470
2,980 sites not listed

 

While Web-exclusive publications tend to draw loyal readers who are often the early adopters of new technology, these readers have also come to expect that their content will be free. According to an article in American Demographics, online magazine readership rivals those of print magazines in terms of the number of eyeballs they attract each month. And, their readers tend to be better educated and have a higher average household income than the general Internet population (Paul, 2001). However, these Internet-only publications still struggle for survival, as their readers don't read online magazines in ways that pay. Even those faithful to online magazines still fall back on publications in print for leisure reading (Paul, 2001).

 

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Brief History of Search Engines and the Problems of Finding Information on the Internet

Over the past decade, the Internet has grown from a research tool to a public information source. The Internet not only provides access to information, but it does so mostly free of charge. Anyone with an Internet connection can use a search engine day or night and pay for nothing more than the cost of their connection. Users have grown so accustomed to this free service that it comes as a shock that someone must finance their favorite search engine.

Not that the means of uncovering information is perfect. Anyone who has tried to find information on the Web by means of an Internet search engine is probably familiar with "search rage," or the inability to easily find that bit of information one is sure exists out there somewhere (Precision Marketing, 2001). Each search engine uses its own algorithms and indexing methods to find and organize the Web sites they include in their databases. This lack of standards for search engines has often left users feeling frustrated.

Metadata, a method of cataloging electronic information, is one way of improving access to online information. A metadata policy was developed for First Monday in 1999, in hopes of improving the ranking of the contents in search engines (Henshaw, 1999). General metatags were combined with elements from the Dublin Core Metadata element set to create the journal's metadata policy. These tags, which are in HTML format, are applied to each article and the table of contents for each monthly issue of First Monday. However, recent research examining several major search engines has shown that this metadata is not effective in influencing results derived from Internet search engines (Henshaw and Valauskas, 2001).

Users of search engines have certainly aired grievances about search results; Web site managers have complained as well about the difficulties and length of time for sites to be indexed by search engines (Notess, 2001).

Search engines have long offered Web site owners a free submit option to give new or changed sites the chance to be included in their indexes. This business model failed to take into account the economic incentive for those Web site owners to raise their ranking in search engine results. Metadata was once thought of as a hopeful solution; however, Web site owners quickly learned that they could increase their results by employing index spamming techniques. For example, some created text the same color as a background so it became invisible to the eye but could still be read by bots crawling the Web. Search engine services responded just as quickly by developing special recognition algorithms that reject spam in its various guises (Notess, 2001).

 

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The Move Toward Paid Placement

The line between content and advertising has long been blurry on the Web. As a new medium that grew very quickly, standards that traditionally applied to print magazines and newspapers do not exist digitally. Advertisements are not always clearly labeled, sources aren't referenced, and conflicts of interest aren't disclosed. Evaluating the reliability of information published on the Internet is challenging at best. The ease with which one can publish on the Internet also becomes its drawback, because many, particularly Internet users in the United States, tend to believe much of what they see on their collective screens. "Let the buyer beware" takes on an entirely different connotation in this electronic realm.

For many, the editorial content of search results is viewed as untainted except perhaps by a poorly written algorithm or an inadequately cataloged index. While users were led to trust search engines as independent from the sites included in their indexes, they have also been a medium for advertisers to target consumers. Through the use of intelligent agents, advertisers can easily target consumers through their search criteria. Users looking for vacation tips on luxury cruises might enter those terms in a popular search engine, and see a banner ad for an online cruise company above their search results. These are relatively obvious advertisements, as they usually flash or scroll past the viewer.

Recently the profitability of search engine services selling banner advertisements has decreased, as users' eyes have grown trained to ignore them (Hansell, 2001). Needing some other way to make up for this financial loss, many search engines have become increasingly entrepreneurial by offering additional services to corporations who are often more than willing to pay for the chance at increasing brand visibility on the Internet. This search for profitability is transforming many search engines into commercial directories rather than "electronic encyclopedias," much in the way telephone directories provide larger ads to companies willing to pay for them (Hansell, 2001).

Companies interested in growing their brand presence online look to search engines to drive traffic to their Web sites. The importance of high placement in search results cannot be downplayed; although 80% of Internet users employ search engines in locating information, less that 20% view more than two pages of search results (Precision Marketing, 2001). Statistics like these emphasize to companies not only the importance of building brand awareness on the Internet, but also doing whatever possible to ensure that their Web sites are among the top retrieved. Businesses also want to be sure that their sites are indexed with accurate keywords, something that does not always occur when left to Web crawlers.

When Open Text announced a paid positioning plan in 1996, Web designers and marketers immediately took to the idea. The users of search engines, however, were not as happy, nor did other search sites embrace the idea. At the time, Jerry Yang, chief of Yahoo!, stated that the company's search results area was a part of "editorial value-add(ed)" and trusted by users. Kevin Brown, director marketing at the time for Inktomi, reiterated the sentiment, saying the company would not consider selling results to the highest bidder (Bernstein, 1996).

The real push towards purchasing inclusion in a list of search results began in November 2000, when the search service GoTo.com convinced America Online to place the top three listings from GoTo above other search results. Since that time, GoTo's paid search listings have expanded to seven of the top ten Web portals and search sites. Other Internet search services have followed suite with paid inclusion services, including Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, MSN Search, and LookSmart (Sullivan, 2001d).

 

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Ways To Advertise In Search Services

In addition to banner ads, there are three basic ways that search engines allow advertisers to buy their way onto search result pages.

Paid placement guarantees a particular position in the first page of search results, but does not interfere with editorial results (commonly thought of as search "hits"). Paid placement ads are offset from the editorial results in some way, appearing at the top, bottom, or side of the page (Sullivan, 2000b). Web sites that pay for placement are paying search engines more money than other advertisers for a particular search term. When users enter that term in a search, the highest bidding advertiser will appear first. Paid placement can be expensive for Web site owners, as they pay the search engine provider for each hit (click-through) they receive.

Paid inclusion does not guarantee an advertiser a particular position, but does interfere with search hits, as results from commercial sites are interspersed with true editorial results. Paying for inclusion allows advertisers to pay for more search term listings in the search engine database. As a result, these advertisers are more likely to see higher traffic that those that don't (Sullivan, 2000b). Paid inclusion normally operates on a flat-fee basis, paying the search engine provider once and not for each click-through. Proponents of paid inclusion say that search engine services can enhance their search engines by helping them to know which advertiser's pages to crawl and how often (Charski, 2001).

The third form is known as paid submission. Search engines using a paid submission form of search offering charge for processing a request just to be included in its database index. This does not guarantee the commercial site a listing in the search results, but promises only to review the site and include it more quickly if the site meets the search engine's standards (Sullivan, 2001d).

One of the larger ethical problems with paying for placement and inclusion in search engines, is that users may, or may not, realize that the results they're viewing are from commercial sites. GoTo.com states explicitly that their site listings have paid to be included by noting the cost to advertisers next to the search results. Other search engines do not make the differentiation quite so clear. AltaVista calls these commercial sites "Featured Sites", AOL notes them as "sponsored links" while the Netscape search engine, also part of the AOL family, calls the same listings "partner search results" (Hansell, 2001). Things become even more questionable with Inktomi and LookSmart, who utilize paid both placement and paid inclusion, but whose listings have no disclosure to users that an advertiser is profiting from it. Search services offering paid placement are quoted as saying users only care about finding information, not that the site has paid to get itself listed. Advertisers have learned from past experiences with banner ads that users avoid clicking on graphics or other elements of a display that look commercial. To plainly state that a site has paid to be ranked within the top search results might deter some users. Proponents of paid placement say users are the winners, retrieving more relevant search results from more extensive indices. "It may also make a search engine better by helping it know which pages to crawl and how often" (Charski, 2001).

Meta search services, which send a query out to many search engines at once, may provide results with more than half paid links, and an even foggier means of delineating whether results are paid links or from true editorial searches (Sullivan, 2001c).

 

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Search Engine Offerings

Below are a few of the specific services offered by some of the major search engines:

GoTo
GoTo.com began in late 1997 as a response to a need for a different kind of search engine - one where Web sites would pay to be included in the search results. GoTo currently has more than 42,000 advertisers who bid in an open auction marketplace on keywords for placement in GoTo's search list. The highest bidder subsequently appears first in GoTo's results and pays GoTo only when a user clicks through to their site (GoTo, 2001). GoTo is still unprofitable, but expects to break even in the fourth quarter of 2001 and begin making money in 2002 (Hansell, 2001).

Google
Standing out from others in the field, Google has, for now, taken a stand against paid inclusion. The company nevertheless offers paid placements on its site, through its AdWords and Premium Sponsorship programs. Premium Sponsorships appear above search results, AdWords to the right and both are labeled "sponsored links." Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology, has stated that Google will not allow paid listings to be added to their index. He did add, however, that if such a program were added in the future those links would continue to be clearly labeled as sponsored and set off from the main list of search results (Charski, 2001).

LookSmart
LookSmart has long had a paid inclusion program, but only recently moved to the paid placement arena. LookSmart is not a crawler, but indexes through a directory created by humans. At LookSmart, all commercial Web sites must pay to be included in this directory. Another specialty service allows companies to pay more and have their site "deeply indexed." This "Subsite" paid inclusion program categorizes individual pages within a Web site in addition to the site's home page. This may allow a site to have hundreds of different listings in the directory, and potentially hundreds more visitors to their site. LookSmart receives a fee from the advertiser for each user it sends to their Web site (Sullivan, 2000b). The LookSmart Network of partner sites includes Excite, AltaVista, MSN, iWon, CNN, Time Warner, and over 370 ISPs (Excite, 2001).

Inktomi
Inktomi is the oldest crawler-based search engine to offer paid inclusion (Sullivan, 2001b). While it does not operate its own search engine, the company provides the technology behind the search engines on many portal sites including HotBot, Microsoft Network, America Online, and About, among others. For a fee, Inktomi offers Web sites guaranteed inclusion and more frequent indexing in order to give publishers more control over which content is in the index and how frequently the content is updated (every 48 hours for sites that sign-up) (Notess, 2001). Site owners pay Inktomi on a sliding scale: US$20 for the first URL, $10 for the next 2 to 100 URLs and $6 for any URLs over 100; however this payment does not influence placement in search results. Inktomi states that fee-based listings allow the company to improve its infrastructure and update their index more frequently (Sullivan, 2001a).

AltaVista
AltaVista, also a crawling search engine, began offering "Express Inclusion" in June of this year. This service lets Web site owners add up to 500 pages to AltaVista's global database during a six-month subscription period, and have their listings are updated weekly (AltaVista, 2001). Twenty-five paid placement pages listed in AltaVista for one year costs over US$1000 (Sullivan, 2001a).

Excite
Excite is another of the crawler-based search engines which expects to offer paid inclusion option by the end of 2001. Currently the company offers Express Submit through their partner, LookSmart. For US$199, a site will be listed in the LookSmart Network of partner sites. Their "Basic Submit" option gives advertisers a site review in approximately eight weeks for a one-time payment of US$99 (Excite, 2001).

FAST
FAST has announced its paid inclusion service will be available in September, 2001, leaving Google as the only crawling search engines not participating in paid inclusion (Sullivan, 2001a).

Yahoo!
Yahoo! charges commercial sites US$199 to be reviewed for inclusion in its directory. The company clearly labels advertisers as "sponsored links" in the directory, charging between US$25 to US$300 a month for the service (Hansell, 2001).

 

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What's Next for Internet Journals and Others Who Can't Pay?

The Internet began as a research tool and has become, in recent years, the main source of information for a great majority of people. Students of all ages use Internet search engines for research, as do business intelligence departments in corporations. While users are becoming increasingly aware that no search engine indexes the entire Internet, currently measured as containing over seven million unique Web pages (OCLC Office of Research, 2000), few but the savviest have any idea that the list of results they're looking at might contain anything but editorial content.

Where does that leave Internet journals such as First Monday and non-profit organizations that cannot afford to pay for inclusion in search engine services? Might search engines employing crawlers drop free listings altogether to concentrate on paid inclusion programs? This is particularly concerning in light of the fact that profitable search engines have been those that let businesses pay to be included in search results (Charski, 2001).

Do users value independent and free Internet-based journals and non-profit sites? A look at First Monday's logs for the year 2000 indicates that papers published in issues of the journal were downloaded from the First Monday server more than one million times (Henshaw and Valauskas, 2001). Clearly this indicates an interest in the site and its content. For example, could a student researching universal Internet access benefit from Richard Wiggin's article in First Monday entitled "Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet" (Wiggins, 2000)? Possibly, but would the student have any luck discovering the article through the use of a search engine?

To see how successful search engines currently are in indexing First Monday, two searches were carried out. A query for the phrase "First Monday" found the home page of the peer-reviewed journal listed in all of the major search engines mentioned in this article (See Table 2 below).

 

Table 2: Ranking of the journal First Monday in eight popular search engines.
*Sullivan, 2001a
Note: Searches completed, 16 July 2001, from 1:15pm-1:47pm CDT. First Monday was searched as a phrase in all search engines.
Search Engine
Ranking for
First Monday
URL cited for
First Monday
Service(s) Offered*
Notes
GoTo.com
2
http://www.firstmonday.dk
Paid Placement
 
LookSmart
3
http://www.firstmonday.dk
Paid Submission;
Paid Inclusion
Ranked #3 under Reviewed Web Sites;
Ranked #2 under Web Sites from Inktomi after a paid placement advertisement.
Google
1
http://www.firstmonday.dk
Paid Placement
Google Category:
News - By Subject - Information Technology - Internet - Commentary.
HotBot
(powered by Inktomi)
1
http://www.firstmonday.dk
Paid Placement;
Paid Inclusion
Ranked #1 in the paid placement area of the site.
AltaVista
1
http://www.firstmonday.dk
Paid Placement;
Paid Inclusion
 
Excite
1
http://www.firstmonday.dk
Paid Placement
Combines listings from the Web with those in their directory.
First Monday was listed in the directory under:
Computers and Internet - Tech News - Publications By Type - Internet.
Yahoo!
1
http://www.firstmonday.dk
Paid Placement;
Paid Submission
Listed #1 in Yahoo!'s directory:
Society and Culture - Cultures and Groups - Cyberculture - Magazines.

 

It is encouraging that First Monday is listed among the top 10 sites in all of the search engines above. It should be noted that the URL shown in Table 1 is the original Danish address for First Monday. References to the Danish address are immediately redirected to the current URL, firstmonday.org.

A search for the specific article "Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet" by Richard Wiggins was made in the same search engines. Hyperlinks to the actual article were found in Google, AltaVista, and Yahoo!. Searching in GoTo and HotBot found pointers to the table of contents for the October, 2000 issue listing the Wiggins article. Neither the article nor the table of contents were found in the top 20 editorial hits in LookSmart and Excite (see Table 3 below).

 

Table 3: Ranking of the article, "Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet" in the same search engines.
*Sullivan, 2001a
Note: Searches completed 16 July 2001, from 2:00pm-2:30pm CDT. "Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet" was searched as a phrase in all search engines.
Search Engine
Web Page Ranking for the phrase "Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet"
URL cited for
article
Service(s) Offered*
Notes
GoTo.com
2
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_10/
Paid Placement
Points to the table of contents for the October, 2000 issue.
LookSmart
not ranked
 
Paid Submission;
Paid Inclusion
Not found in Featured Listings,
Directory Topics or among the top 20 Reviewed Web Sites.
Google
1
www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_10/wiggins/
Paid Placement
Points to actual article.
HotBot
(powered by Inktomi)
2
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_10/
Paid Placement;
Paid Inclusion
Points to the table of contents for the October, 2000 issue.
AltaVista
3
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_10/wiggins/index.html
Paid Placement;
Paid Inclusion
Points to actual article.
Excite
not ranked
 
Paid Placement
Not found in Web Sites or
in their Web Directory.
Yahoo!
1
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_10/wiggins/
Paid Placement;
Paid Submission
Points to actual article.

 

These searches illustrate that although all of these sites have pay for placement, inclusion, or submission policies of some sort, it is still possible to find pure editorial content in some search engines.

An effort by Consumers Union, the non-profit publisher of the magazine Consumer Reports, stands to have a great impact on public disclosure standards on the Internet. In 2001, the organization will be launching its largest grant-funded project, a three-year Web Credibility Program with a US$4.8 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, Knight Foundation, and Open Society Institute (Consumer Union, 2001). The project has the following goals:

Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Watch, an online newsletter that monitors search engines, suggests that search engines might need to become more creative in developing new revenue sources. An example would be developing a click-through report, which would show advertisers how many clicks a service brought to their site, the accompanying search terms, and the search engine that generated the traffic (Sullivan, 2001b).

The Dublin Core is also making progress in standardizing metadata. However, there has been little commercial benefit to search engines to invest time and money in modifying their algorithms to recognize metadata. And once a metadata standard is established the question becomes who will add the metadata to the Web sites? (Thomas and Griffin, 1998) Would Web site owners be the ones responsible for adding metadata beyond simple descriptions and keywords? Perhaps librarians would find renewed prospects as corporations hire them to organize their sites. Or perhaps, for those businesses that can, it's just easier to pay for inclusion, submission, or placement.

Possibly non-profit organizations can bond together to build their own search engine, or receive grants to do so. If promoted in colleges and universities as the search engine for research or scholars, it might just work. The Internet started as a government research tool before spreading throughout the world, so maybe it's time to dedicate a section of it back to the scholarly community.

But altruism in the business world tends to lose out when the bottom line is at stake. According to LookSmart CEO Evan Thornley, 90% of the online marketing value of searching is in the search, which the search industry has been giving away for free. He remarked that " ... trying to make money by the billboards [referring to Web banner ads] on the side of the road has to stop" (Charski, 2001). Perhaps, but could this new found profitability lead search engines to pull back on crawling, or become the first step towards their carrying only paid inclusion Web sites? Any change in the search engine business model will directly impact a user's search experience on the Internet (Information Advisor, 2001),

Other scenarios might have users themselves driving search engine services away from paid placement, inclusion, or submission. If the Consumers Union project is successful in developing disclosure standards, users would become more aware of the practices of Web sites. Or, search engines might lose credibility if users experience increasing "search rage" as a result of discovering that the first two pages of retrieved Web sites are not relevant (Precision Marketing 2001).

Search engines sites have always been free to anyone with Internet access. This has made it easy for users to forget that search engines are businesses, and money to support their efforts has to come from somewhere. Might users consider paying a fee to use a search engine that only indexes certain "credible" sites such as online journals, scholarly publications, and university and government information? This scenario does not seem likely, as 77% of Internet users have indicated that their preference for free online content (Paul, 2001).

 

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Conclusion

The immediate outlook does not appear promising for the continued inclusion of free Internet journals and other non-profit organizations in profit-driven search engine indexes. Public awareness of disclosure practices and the realization that the Internet holds quality information that is becoming increasingly difficult to uncover, but unavailable outside the virtual realm, may be the first step to the next generation of socially-conscious Internet search engines. End of article

 

About the Author

Robin Henshaw is Metadata Editor for First Monday.
Web: http://firstmonday.org/people/henshaw.html
E-mail: rhw@americancentury.com

 

References

Altavista, 2001. "Drive Qualified Traffic To Your Site," at http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/express_incl

Judith H. Bernstein, 1996. "Slanted Search Results for Sale," Netguide NewsCam Weekly (September), at http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?NTG19960901S0032

Mindy Charski, 2001. "The Virtuous Search Engine," Interactive Week (4 June), at http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2767661,00.html

Consumer Union, 2001. "Oh, What a Tangled Web," Consumer Reports, volume 66, number 1, p. 6.

Excite, 2001. "Excite Info," at http://www.excite.com/info/add_url

GoTo, 2001. "About Goto.com," at http://www.goto.com/d/about/company/usvision.jhtml

Saul Hansell, 2001. "Clicks for Sale. Paid Placement is Catching on in Web Searches," New York Times (4 June).

Robin Henshaw, 1999. "The First Monday Metadata Project," Libri, volume 49, number 3, pp. 125-131.

Robin Henshaw and Edward J. Valauskas, 2001. "Metadata as a Catalyst: Experiments with Metadata and Search Engines in the Internet Journal First Monday," Libri, volume 51, number 2, pp. 86-101.

K. Kris Hirst, 1997. "Mining the Web: Techniques for Bridging the Gap between Content Producers and Consumers," First Monday, volume 2, number 10 (October), at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_10/hirst/

Information Advisor, 2001. "Search Engines' Search: "Revenue" AND "Profit," Information Advisor, volume 13, number 1, pp. 7-8.

Verne Kopytoff, 2001. "Searching for profits. Amid tech slump, more portals sell search engine results to highest bidder," San Francisco Chronicle (18 June), p. B-1, and at http://www.sfgate.com

NewJour Electronic Journals and Newsletters, 2001. "New Journals and Newsletters on the Internet," available at http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/NewJourWel.html

Greg R. Notess, 2001. "Joining the In-Crowd," EContent, volume 24, number 3, p. 60.

OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) Office of Research, 2000. "The Web Characterization Project," at http://wcp.oclc.org/

Ann Okerson, 2000. "Are We There Yet? Online E-Resources Ten Years After," Library Trends, volume 48, number 4, p. 671.

Joseph Palca, 1991. "New Journal Will Publish Without Paper," Science, volume 253, number 5027, p. 1480.

Richard Einer Peterson, 1997. "Eight Internet Search Engines Compared," First Monday, volume 2, number 2 (February), at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_2/peterson/

Precision Marketing, 2001. "Search Rage, " Precision Marketing (23 February), p. 28.

Danny Sullivan, 2001a. "Pay for Placement?," Search Engine Watch (2 July), at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/resources/paid-listings.html

Danny Sullivan, 2001b. "The Evolution of Paid Inclusion," Search Engine Watch (2 July), at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/sereport/01/07-inclusion.html

Danny Sullivan, 2001c. "Meta Search or Meta Ads?" Search Engine Watch (23 May), at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/sereport/01/05-metasearch.html

Danny Sullivan, 2001d. "Buying Your Way in to Search Engines," Search Engine Watch (2 May), at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/paid.html

Danny Sullivan, 2000a. "Inktomi Debuts Self-Serve Paid Inclusion," Search Engine Watch (3 November), at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/sereport/00/11-inktomi.html

Danny Sullivan, 2000b. "Paid Inclusion at Search Engines Gains Ground," Search Engine Watch (3 November), at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/sereport/00/11-inclusion.html

Charles F. Thomas and Linda Griffin, 1998. "Who Will Create the Metadata for the Internet?" First Monday, volume 3, number 12 (December), at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_12/thomas/

Richard Wiggins, 2000. "Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet," First Monday, volume 5, number 10 (October), at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_10/wiggins/

Editorial history

Paper received 19 July 2001; accepted 17 August 2001.

Contents Index

Copyright ©2001, First Monday

What Next for Internet Journals? Implications of the Trend Towards Paid Placement in Search Engines by Robin Henshaw
First Monday, volume 6, number 9 (September 2001),
URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_9/henshaw/index.html