Google testing new paid inclusion service

• Aug. 31, 2001

Representatives from Google have announced that the engine is working toward a paid inclusion service in reaction to similar services offered by rival portals such as Inktomi and Alta Vista. Google's goal is to be able to provide their customers with the freshest database on the internet; this means the engine's database of sites would be spidered almost daily, replacing their current schedule of about 30 days between updates. With a recent announcement from FAST Technologies claiming the "Freshest" database on the internet, Google may simply be trying to compete.

It's believed that Google's new paid service would be similar to Inktomi's in that Google would charge an annual fee, and offer a guarantee that the sites submitted would be revisited on a daily or weekly basis. Google already has such a schedule in place for larger news oriented sites, such as CNN, but obviously the database would be much more relevant if many more sites were spidered this frequently. However, this all depends on the consumer, and it remains to be seen how many webmasters and site owners will actually participate in the program

Google working on paid-crawl service
ZDnet, August 23, 2001

Jason Lane
jason@searchengineposition.com