I willingly admit AdSense has a few advantages with which today's affiliate programs simply can't compete. Featuring a "set it and forget it" mentality, AdSense allows you to spend a few minutes setting up your page and know that fresh content will appear each time your visitors return, without any additional work on your part. The closest I've seen an affiliate program come to this is Amazon allowing you to display top sellers in a given category at any time. It isn't as versatile as AdSense, though, and it does take more time and effort to setup.

The other striking advantage AdSense has over affiliate programs is range of content pages for which it is appropriate. If you have a page about web site hosting, there is no shortage of web site hosting affiliate programs that will help you generate revenue and provide additional information for your visitors. Create a page about American Civil War, though, and you will have a hard time finding an affiliate program that relates to your content. Civil War webmasters should sign up for AdSense and Google will provide several paying links that will likely be of interest to visitors.

Lest you think title of this article was an accident, let me explain where AdSense falls short. The reporting and tracking available is bare bones. All you get is number of impressions, clicks, and total earned for each day. The lack of information about which page on your site generated click and what text of ad was makes it difficult to know how to improve your conversion rate.

Somewhat inexplicably, part of AdSense user agreement requires that you not disclose your AdSense statistics to other webmasters. The only explanation I can imagine is Google wants to prevent anyone from cracking algorithms they use in calculating payments. Which leads to my next point…

Google is not disclosing how your earnings are calculated. At least in these early stages of program, revenue is high enough that no one is complaining. Some reports that I've read indicate earnings per click of $.25 up to a dollar and higher for some keywords. My personal experience with AdSense lends credence to these claims, but Google is in no way obligated to maintain these amounts.

Russian Search Engines and Directories

Yandex.ru Founded in 1997 as a search engine and directory, site currently provides some additional search and indexing services via Yandex projects such as zakladki.ru, narod.ru, smart system for choosing goods, link popularity check, etc. Yandex indexes Russian portion of Internet, Russia-related resources and some Cyrillic Web resources in languages of ex-Soviet republics, Ukrainian in particular. The search engine reads meta tags and considers keyword density and link popularity in its ranking algorithm. The Yandex directory still accepts sites without payment, but free inclusion procedure may take months and provides no guarantee for placement. To be listed in directory within three working days, commercial and non-commercial sites must pay US$249 and $49 respectively, plus VAT. Generally speaking, Yandex looks like Yahoo when it comes to controversial idea of charging for listing in a directory, while a free-inclusion search engine drives primary search results on site. In addition to HTML-formatted content, Yandex search engine indexes PDF, RTF and dynamically generated pages. By mid-September 2003, Yandex had indexed about 110 million pages with unique content.

Rambler.ru The site is a search engine combined with two directory-based rating systems: Rambler's Top100 and Rambler's TopShop. Since its foundation in 1996, search engine has been indexing Russian Web segment and content with domains of other post-Soviet countries. Rambler ignores meta tags. Being listed in Top100 directory is very beneficial to a site, because Rambler search engine reviews listed URLs daily, while other sites are visited every two weeks at most, except news sites that are spidered five times a day. Rambler offers free inclusion service. The search engine conducts over 1.1 million searches a day.

Aport.ru Search engine and directory. Aport indexes Russian Web segment and content with domains of other post-Soviet countries. The ranking algorithm considers meta tags, alt and title tags, keyword density, inbound links, commentaries and some other factors. The search engine indexes dynamic pages. The integrated directory is based on @Rus, once an independent search site. Both search engine and directory offer free inclusion. Aport operates as a constituent part of a Rol.ru portal that, in addition to its search options, offers services nationwide as an ISP and provides access to news (Rol.ru/news), sample essays (Referat.ru), entertainment pages (OMEN.Ru) and online games (Absolute games).

Google.com.ru - Not Google.Ru! Despite Google still lags behind above search engines in Runet / Uanet search traffic, it becomes increasingly popular with local searchers. Some opinion polls state that Google still accounts for three to nine percent of Runet search traffic, but many webmasters and analysts believe that its share in total searches on Russian search sites is 10 percent at very least. Google applies its general indexing rules to any Web content in Russian or related to Russia, whether or not a domain name is specific to Runet. This is a big advantage over its Russian competitors that are not so friendly to websites with domain names like "yoursite.com", "yoursite.org", etc. and require them email their applications for inclusion. However, there seems little chance of Google taking lead in Russia and Ukraine unless it improves its search algorithm in terms of Russian and Ukrainian language morphology (flexions, synonyms, etc.). The drawback to morpheme search also means that web copy in Russian or Ukrainian should be crafted specifically for Google.

Many users still confuse Google (www.google.com.ru) with Google.Ru (www.google.ru). The first address is true URL path to Google's standard interface in Russian, while second domain name has been cybersquatted on since August 2001. The site "Google.Ru" now operates as an information portal that delivers brand-name Google's search results.

Lycos.ru Lycos Russia, a branch of Lycos Europe, first appeared on Internet in August 2001. You can add your URLs to Lycos Russia's search engine and directory for free. The search site is very helpful in doing combined global-and-regional searches. Obviously, Lycos Russia stands a good chance of being ranked higher among local search sites, but it may take a few more years for Lycos, still popular with Europeans, to ensure its profitability and growth on Russian Web.

Punto.ru Search engine. Founded in 2001. Punto can filter out duplicated copy in search results, leaving most relevant page. The search site has a software module that changes misspellings so that any misspelled keyword or phrase you type in cannot affect search results. Searches in Ukrainian are possible as well. The ranking algorithm places great importance on link popularity.

Turtle.ru The search engine with a bit peculiar name began operating in mid-2002, having over 81 million pages in its searchable database. Despite its name, Turtle does searches quite fast, but it displays less relevant search results, compared to top four engines. Turtle declares that it indexes regional Internet portions of ex-Soviet republics (the CIS countries) in their national languages as well as Russian-language Web resources of other countries. However, when I tested Turtle recently, it failed to do searches in Ukrainian. Automatic submission is not allowed.