Then I think what if World Wide Web had lost out to World Wide Subway System (WWSS) or some other less noble term? Then I take it one step further and think, "What if term search had lost out to seek"? Let's think about this for a moment. Seek is a good word with a nearly identical meaning to search. In fact, in Oxford American Dictionary (with torn off cover and publishing info) it states that seek means "…to make a search or inquiry for, to try to find or obtain or do."

In Seek Of

What would be repercussions of using seek speak instead of search? First there would be seek engines and seek engine optimizers who would try to get top rankings on these engines. Then you would have specialized seeking going on like local seek, personalized seek and contextual seek. There may be terms bandied about like seek engine specific algorithms, seek options, seek tips, seek tools and seek toolbars. If you're looking for someone online, this would be people seek. If there is something that you cannot find, you would be seeking high and low. Out in real world you may conduct a talent seek for next teen idol.

A Pay-Per-Inclusion search engine is a service in which a search engine charges you a certain amount to spider and include your website in its database. For this fee, regular repeated spiderings are guaranteed, so you are sure to be indexed.

However, rankings are not guaranteed. These pages have no advantage over any page submitted for free. A few years ago, pay-per-inclusion search engines such as Inktomi, Altavista, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo were introduced. However, they have failed badly and have lost traffic to Google.

Why Google is Tops

Google built LARGEST search engine database because it refused to adopt pay-per-inclusion model. By allowing every website to submit its pages free, it built an enormous database of websites. Good news for everyone searching Google’s database!

Google’s competitors were unable to deliver same results, partly because they had fewer websites to choose from. If you charge for entry into a search engine, you eliminate over 90% of websites on Net which cannot justify such a fee.

What pay-per-inclusion search engines did not understand was that their real customers were ADVERTISERS and not searchers. Nor were websites customers of engines.