On 30 Apr 00, at 0:22, Sixto Balicoco wrote:

> Would anyone please help me with this confusion?

> I know that placing your website into a search engine requires
> payment in exchange for that service.

  This is going to depend on the policy of the specific search
engine.  But it doesn't sound like any search engine I know of.
Instead, it sounds like a price from a service from an agency that
will list your site with various searche ngines for you.  The search
engines themselves typically don't charge anything to list you --
they make their money off of advertising, and they can charge more
for that if they can attract more users, and they attract more users
by having more complete listings....
  Altavista, for instance, has a mechanism by which anyone --
including you yourself -- can feed them a URL to be checked, and
either added if it's not already listed, or removed if it is listed
but no longer works.
  To go around and feed your URL to each of the popular search
engines, each in their own peculiar way, would be a pain.  It could
be worth a payment to someone who specializes in that, especially if
yours is a business site.

> I read an article that in order to be always say, "on top of the
> list", you'd have to submit it like every two weeks.

  This could be true for search engines that show the most recent
sites first, as likely to be most current.  But I don't know of any
search engines that actually do that!  So this sounds to me like an
agency (see above) trying to "milk" their existing customers....

> Now I was relating it to placing your company name in the yellow
> pages so people would easily find you and once you're there,
> you're there.

  Many analogies from paper advertising don't transfer very exactly
to the Internet.  Recall, for instance, that every year the phone
company replaces your directory, and you have to haul the old one off
to the recycling place.  A search engine delivers users a list of
hits today -- and the same query might get a different list tomorrow.

David G

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