There's nothing worse than waking up to bad news.

Of course, it wasn't actually news as much as supposition and extrapolation. But the conclusions that Art Kautz came to in his Internet Day column really bothered me.

Kautz' theory is that, with so many similar businesses attempting to get placement in search engines, that eventually search engines themselves will be cynically charging sites to get listed, or to get good placement. This is in direct opposition to the current system, where the quality of the search engine itself is measured by how well it responds to queries with appropriate sites.

Let's just hope he's not right. Because to me, the beautiful thing about the Web is precisely the fact that anyone can set up a site that's equal to or better than a site put up by a giant corporation...and then, for reasons of content or style, become a great success, possibly beating that giant corporation at its own game.

It would be especially sad if companies like Yahoo and AltaVista helped this come about -- forgetting their roots -- since they are perfect examples of how this success-from-nowhere happened already.

I'm not saying that AltaVista auctioning off its top two positions for each keyword is necessarily a bad thing, so long as those positions are clearly marked as having been bought and paid for. But if things ever deteriorate to the point where you have to pay to get listed on any particular search engine, I would hope that the Internet community would vote with their mice and totally desert that search engine^*. That would open up plenty of room for a newer one to become a success.

It takes integrity, not just money, to succeed on the Web. At least, it should.
-- D. Fiedler

David Fiedler is Editor-in-Chief of WebDeveloper.com, and his opinions are definitely his own.