Favored placement (also known as preferred placement) is the practice of preferentially listing search engine results for given sites. It is also known as pay for placement, but this term usually refers to advertisements that appear along with relevant search results while favored placement affects the order of actual search results. One of the earliest companies to use favored placement was

Open Text Corporation OpenText Corporation (also written ''opentext'') is a Canadian company that develops and sells enterprise information management (EIM) software. OpenText, headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, is Canada's fourth-largest software company ...

for its Open Text Index search engine in 1996. However, the practice was met with complaints from consumers, and Open Text abandoned the idea within a few weeks. In February 1998 GoTo.com, a project of

Idealab Idealab (formerly known as idealab!) is a startup studio based in Pasadena, California, U.S.A. History Idealab was founded by Bill T. Gross (not to be confused with the founder of PIMCO, Bill H. Gross) in March 1996. Prior to Idealab, Gross fou ...

, started using favored placement. The search engine ranked web sites depending on how much they are willing to pay to be listed at the top for a search term under a real-time competitive bidding process. Unlike Open Text, GoTo.com was more successful that after five months, more than a thousand sites were paying for favored placement.

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

acquired GoTo.com (which was renamed

Overture Services, Inc. Overture (from French ''ouverture'', "opening") in music was originally the instrumental introduction to a ballet, opera, or oratorio in the 17th century. During the early Romantic era, composers such as Beethoven and Mendelssohn composed overtu ...

at the time) and the service became

Yahoo! Search Marketing Yahoo! Native (formerly known as Yahoo! Advertising, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo! Gemini) is a native "Pay per click" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo. Yahoo began offering this service after acquiring Overture Services, Inc. ...

. As part of the Google-AOL deal in 2005,

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site. Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, claims that Google has "hard-coded" bias in the algorithm it employs to generate its OneBox results which are shown usually at the top when a query can be answered quickly or a direct link can be given. Edelman, states that in such cases, Google services such as

Google Finance Google Finance is a website focusing on business news and financial information hosted by Google. History Google Finance was first launched by Google on March 21, 2006. The service featured business and enterprise headlines for many corporation ...

receive preferential listing over more popular finance sites such as

Yahoo! Finance Yahoo! Finance is a media property that is part of the Yahoo! network. It provides financial news, data and commentary including stock quotes, press releases, financial reports, and original content. It also offers some online tools for perso ...

. However, Barry Schwartz, CEO of RustyBrick, points out that OneBox results are not organic and therefore should not been viewed as algorithmic.

References

Internet search engines {{Compu-network-stub