Everybody knows how to use a phone book. If you want a plumber, for example, you find "Plumbers" or "Plumbing Contractors" in the phone book. You assume that all the plumbers of any significance are located there. It makes such sense that finding things in this manner is completely ingrained in us.

So when you are trying to find something on the web, it's natural to assume that a search engine works in the same way. You might assume, for example, that when you enter the words "real estate" in a search engine, you’d get a list of all the most important real estate web sites. But that isn’t the way search engines work.

Skeptical? Try it. Search on "real estate" at some well-known search engines. Do the top 10 or so sites that come up in the search results seem like they are the biggest or "best" ones out there, by any measure? I’ve never gotten results like this, for anything that I’ve ever searched on.

Here's another kind of phone-book assumption about search engines, but at the local level. Suppose you have a web site about Tucson real estate. You submit it to the search engines, and then you expect that: "Whenever someone searches for 'Tucson' or 'Tucson real estate', my site should come up, in every search engine!"

If search engines were like phone books, this would make total sense. But if you've had a web site for any length of time, you've seen first hand that this isn't so.

Then there’s the phone-book assumption, which leads to requests like ”I want my site to be listed under the following 12 cities in every search engine…" Who could blame you for wanting this? But it's simply not how search engines work.

Here's the deal: You pay to be listed in the phone book. But you don’t pay to be listed in search engines. It’s free.

With the phone book, if you want to be the biggest listing under "real estate", you pay them for it. If you want to be listed under "Tucson real estate", you pay them to put you there. And if you want to be listed in a bunch of different cities, you go to each phone book, for each city, and pay them. When you get your bill, and look in the phone book, and see you aren't there, you can call them up and demand that they get things right.

But not with search engines. They put you in their systems for free. That's right, it is totally and completely free. If you get into their systems, it's because it benefits them some other way.

How? Your relatively small web site benefits them by becoming part of the content that attracts visitors. Without your web site, and countless other web sites like yours, would anyone have been interested in Yahoo! years ago? Of course not. People go to search engines to find other web sites about what they are really interested in.

Search engines need you. That’s why getting into them is free. But since you get in for free, they have zero obligations to you. You can’t call them up and demand anything. You can’t tell them where to put you. You can’t tell them how you want your listings to appear. And you can’t tell them when you want to come up in their results.

By the way, if you call up a search engine and try to influence or pay for results, you’ll end up instead talking to a nice advertising sales rep, not about getting your web site better positioning in their search results, but about banner ads, which cost big bucks. At search engines, letting web site owners influence search results is anathema. Never shall the former pollute the latter. Believe me, as a company, we've tried.

You can intelligently build web sites, optimized for high search engine placement. My company works very hard on this, but ultimately it is impossible to absolutely control how any web site places in search engine results. If anyone tells you any different, they are mistaken. I’ll talk more about this in a future article.

When I realized that search engines operate nothing like phone books - about 30 seconds after doing my first search - it completely changed the direction of our company. That’s when we started to have serious discussions with all those nice advertising sales reps. You see, we can control advertising. If I go into a search engine, and see that our ads on behalf of our clients aren’t there, I can call up the search engine in question, and they listen. Not only that, they make things right, and fast. I like that.