In a comment left at the Stepforth blog, Jim Lanzone, Ask.com’s CEO, has said that he considers paid inclusion a “dis-service”. Jim explains that he finds it “hypocritical to charge for something we need to do anyway,” i.e. crawl the web to find quality pages to present to the searcher. In addition, Mr. Lanzone explains that it “blurs the line” between “paid content and editorial content” making it hard for the searcher to possibly trust the search results.

Lanzone does not go as far to accuse Yahoo of skewing the results in favor of paid inclusion results. Lanzone does say that “Paid Inclusion is just not on the table for Ask.com,” which is good to know.

I have confirmed from Ask.com that these comments are from Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Ask.com. Ask.com discontinued its paid inclusion service on August 31, 2004.

Related Topics: Ask: Employees | Ask: Promotions | Ask: SEO | Ask: Web Search | Yahoo: General | Yahoo: Search | Yahoo: SEO

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz