Blocked from the televised debates, his presidential hopes hinged on a Net-based campaign, but consumer advocate Ralph Nader has never owned a PC. Nader, who once stated, “our fundamental rights are threatened by new information technologies, and by the buying and selling of personal information,” has repeatedly spoken out against companies like Microsoft. But as the legal tide turned in Microsoft’s favor at the close of the Clinton administration, and Nader failed to convince ICANN (Internet Corp. for Assignment of Names and Numbers) to adopt punitive domain extensions such as dotsucks, dotisnotfair and dotisnotgreen, Nader’s Technology Project may redirect its attacks at pay-for-placement search engines.

Nader’s opposition to top search spots for the highest bidder is backed by grass roots web developers. Bill Gross of IdeaLabs developed the first pay-for-placement search program when he introduced GoTo.com. Pay-for-placement schemes have netted huge profits by auctioning off first position in keyword searches and spawned at least two new industries along the way; management systems, like Xpert Pages Marketing, which help webmasters bid for top keyword search spots, and monitoring systems, like Position Guardian, which alert webmasters when keywords are lost to higher bidders. It’s a win-win situation for the search engines. Minimum bids for just about any keyword start at 5 cents per clickthrough; several keywords have passed $2 per clickthrough, and monthly minimums typically range from $20-$50 to keep your site in a top keyword search spot.

If “pay-for-placement” sounds too rich (many companies have dropped out of the increasingly high-tech keyword bidding wars), there is always “paid inclusion.” Most web developers are familiar with paid inclusion. For a one-time fee of $100 to $200, search engine “editors” will review your application (meaning they will add your URL to an existing list of URL’s under your choice of keywords). GoTo, LookSmart and Yahoo guarantee that your “paid inclusion” site will be pulled into their search results before sites listed under similar keywords that have not paid for inclusion; thus, a “paid inclusion” site competes only with other “paid inclusion” sites.

But can Nader make a legitimate case that “pay-for-placement” hurts Internet Surfers? We put the LookSmart search engine, which features an optional $199 Express website submit service, to the test. If you are worried that you will find muffler advertisements at the top of the search list for the “Gettysburg Address,” think again. As for a number of other randomly selected topics, LookSmart found useful information on the Gettysburg address; in fact, the actual text was available at each of the top 5 sites LookSmart recommended. Looks like LookSmart is actually pretty smart.

Want to voice your opposition to search engine submission fees? Submit your site to Google’s open directory project, where the ride is still free.