DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Following up on Friday’s piece about the death of the web search industry, I discovered an excellent example of just how dismal the prospect of pay-to-play submissions can be.

Ask Jeeves and Teoma share this Site Submit page. It describes their fee-based submission tool with a few bullet-pointed features:

• “Submit up to 1,000 different URLs for inclusion”
• “One-time fee ensures a full year of inclusion in this powerful database”

They require the user to click through before they explain that the “one-time fee” is charged per URL. Meaning, if you follow their suggestion and submit 1,000 URLs, they’ll invoice you for — I’m not kidding — $18,012.

You need not ever refresh or update your pages; presumably they’ll index your stale old crap over and over again, all year, ensuring that the “latest, best content is always available to our users”. Or, as necessary, the outdated, uninteresting, poorly-formed content published by someone with $18,012 to blow.

(At this point I picture Jeeves standing insouciantly in his tuxedo, before an open bottle of chrome polish… in one hand he holds a chamois, in the other, a turd.)