RedZee Search Engine - The Top3 Scam

The RedZee search results have a few interesting features such as website thumbnails and Quick View (similar to the Ask.com), but at the core of every search engine is the relevancy of its search results. Google did not become the number one search engine because of witty advertising or a flashy design. Google is recognized as the best search engine because it can be counted on to return relevant search results.

RedZee on the other hand does not appear to have this aspect of the search engine industry figured out. Results are slow in coming and do not return the expected results at the top if at all. For example, a query for the term "cell phone" returned an article titled "Student shot video of campus shooting" from CNN as the top result and a search for "redzee company info" returns a RedZee scam notice on a blogspot.com blog in the number one spot.

Clearly there is a lot of work to be done to even compete with any of the big search engines.

For sites that are not able to crack into the natural search listings but want a share of the traffic from RedZee, the search engine offers three sponsored listings at the top of each page. Unlike other search platforms like Google and Yahoo!, these listings are purchased for a flat rate cost per click on a first come, first serve basis. Then, instead of jockeying for position based on bid amounts, the order of the top three is randomly shuffled each time the search is run.

My company was recently contacted by RedZee and quoted a price for these listings of $400 for 5,000 clicks or $600 for 10,000 clicks. Compared to what we are currently spending for that same keyword, as the phone rep was eager to point out, this was a considerable savings per visitor. If we purchased the listing, we would then have the option to renew as often as we want.

On the surface, this seemed like a great deal, almost too good to be true; especially when you consider that top placement for the search term in question typically goes for over $4 per click on the big three engines. But as is the case the vast majority of the time, the old adage proved true. Just a few minutes of research was required to justify our hesitancy to sign up with RedZee.

In pitching the RedZee Top3 Search Engine, the RedZee rep we spoke with set as the cornerstone of his sales pitch the ability of RedZee to guarantee top placements from the major search engines as part of the Top3 service. He stated that at the same $.06 or $.08 price we would be paying per click for the sponsored listings in the RedZee search engine results pages, we would be getting clicks directly from Google, Yahoo!, and MSN visitors who searched for our sponsored term.

This was possible, he said, through an exclusive "partnership" RedZee shared with the engines. While others were paying 50-100 times as much for a click through the standard sponsored listings, RedZee would be able to get clicks for us and at most two other sites for next to nothing.

Once again, it seemed too good to be true, but is begged the question of how RedZee was able to form such a "partnership" with some of the largest companies in the world that would take money from their pockets at the rate of a few dollars per click. Enter the RedZee Toolbar.

Another feature if the RedZee engine is a toolbar that visitors can install to use RedZee features such as website thumbnails and Quick View on other search engines. This allows people to take the best of RedZee and use a competing search engine that produces superior search results. According to the RedZee rep, this toolbar had been downloaded over 9 million times by users.

What is not communicated to users of the RedZee toolbar is the full effects of using the service and specifically how it plays with the RedZee Top3 Search Engine sponsored results.

RedZee sees respectable traffic to its site, but it pales in comparison to the traffic of the big three search engines. As such, it would take months or years to generate even a thousand searches for a single keyword phrase so it becomes necessary to get more ad impressions in order for the RedZee Top3 Search to be profitable. It is the "relationship" with the big three engines that makes this possible.

"Relationship" throughout this page is in quotes for the simple reason that it is not a relationship at all, regardless of what the rep said. The RedZee "relationship" works by using the RedZee Toolbar to alter the search results people see when using Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others. Instead of seeing the top ten results they would expect, the RedZee Toolbar automatically inserts three listings above these results; the three RedZee Top3 Search sponsored listings they offered to sell us for $.06 or $.08 per click.

So in effect, this "partnership" is actually a manipulation of search results, the same results that, as mentioned above, are the core of a quality search engine. This undocumented "feature" of the RedZee Toolbar is likely one of the reasons the toolbar is considered adware by many anti-virus firms and is automatically removed.

Granted, RedZee's practices are shady and manipulative, but in business sometimes the bounds of morality can be fuzzy when it comes to marketing a product. Especially if, after all, we are convinced that that people would benefit from purchasing our product or service. Why should we complain if RedZee's tactics can get us more traffic at a cheap rate when it will ultimately result in more money for us and a larger base of satisfied customers?

No, the biggest reason we decided not to try RedZee was because RedZee does not seem to limit their deception to searchers. A quick search for RedZee, even from the RedZee site itself, returned plenty of results with people complaining of low or non-existent conversion rates and traffic that behaved more like a bot than a human visitor. It would appear that people who have used the RedZee Top3 Search Results service in hopes of paying next to nothing for visitors have gotten exactly nothing in return.

Keeping our business hats on, one might ask why share our knowledge about RedZee. If competitors are also being pitched the RedZee Top3, which the rep stated was exactly the case, why not let them make the mistake?

The reason we want to spread the word about RedZee is for primarily practical reasons. We have worked hard to achieve top organic search listings. As of right now we are number one or two for the keyword RedZee pitched us on in all three major engines. That is, unless someone has the RedZee Toolbar installed. Then we are pushed back three spots.

In the eyes of the major search engines, we are the top company in our field. When RedZee injects their results, they steal our traffic and demote our brand. For this reason, we would rather see RedZee's cash flow diminish and their user base shrink than have a competitor blow $400.

But this is the primary reason for posting this article and not the only reason. There is also the vindictive side of us that does not appreciate the gall of a company that basically blackmails us by stealing our hard earned traffic and threatening to sell it to a competitor if we are not willing to buy it back.

The rep we spoke with talked of only good things on the horizon for RedZee. He even sent over a video of a commercial they will be launching.

We don't share his enthusiasm. In fact, we predict quite the opposite if RedZee actually goes through with the marketing campaign.

RedZee has survived this long because it is a relative unknown. Sure, there have been a few posts on various forums about bad experiences and shady tactics, but these are far from the mainstream. Admittedly, when we were contacted by the RedZee rep, we knew nothing of the engine and were moderately intrigued by the offer; intrigue that obviously waned the longer he talked and the more we learned.

The majority of the press out there is in the form of press releases and self serving (and probably self authored) articles applauding the company for its lofty goal of a completely porn free search engine. This will change as more people come in contact with RedZee.

The mass marketing of RedZee is the absolute worst thing that the company can do at this point. The desire to get larger and more profitable will expose the nasty underbelly of the product and will create a backlash that exceeds whatever success the company initially enjoys.

Instead of a few forum posts and industry blogs, the true nature of RedZee will show up in major publications, both online and off. While the company's profits will spike, the fall will be just as momentous.

If RedZee continues to operate under the radar, the may be able to sustain their business for another few years. If they make a earnest attempt to go mainstream, the RedZee as we know it may be around in a year, but I wouldn't count on it.

For us, it is entertaining to dissect a con. Below are some of the components of the RedZee scam that we witnessed and judging by just about every other post about RedZee we came across, are typical of the RedZee sales call.

1. Misrepresentation of Demand - As many salesmen do, our rep tried to make it sound like we only had a limited time to purchase a sponsored listing on our preferred term. As he showed us on the RedZee site, there were only three listings; two were already taken and one was a demo ad for our site that he placed during the call. According to him, the third slot most likely would be sold within 48 hours.

The funny thing was that not long after the call, two of the three listings were removed leaving only the listing for the unfortunate company that had not done its homework.

2. Misrepresentation of Site Traffic - The RedZee rep we spoke to claimed that RedZee is the 1,178 most popular site on the Net according to Ranking.com, and sure enough, that's what the site says. The problem is that the Ranking.com algorithm clearly has some holes and looks to be susceptible to being gamed. Otherwise, why would an immensely popular site like redzee.com be ranked 1,178 and a non-existent site like sdfhhhhhhfd.com be ranked 1,179?

Perhaps part of the reason for this is in the ranking methodology. According to Rankins.com, they gather their ranking information using "our market research software" which is a toolbar installed by "215,000 'Net surfers". Clearly a study with this sample size has potential for error and the fact that the Ranking.com toolbar and the RedZee toolbar could easily be packaged or even spliced together makes the RedZee tracking numbers very suspect.

3. Misrepresentation of Growth Forecasts - While we may be wrong here (how do you dispute something that hasn't happened yet), we suspect that RedZee's talk of an impending media blitz may be more talk than substance based on a post we cam across from over a year ago where this tactic was used in the sales pitch.

4. Misrepresentation of User Base - Our RedZee rep claimed 9,000,000 installations of the RedZee toolbar. When asked how people were installing the toolbar and specifically if it was being bundled with other software, the rep stated that the people with the toolbar have browsed to the RedZee site and intentionally downloaded it from there.

A little investigation after the call turned up evidence that the toolbar was in fact being bundled with other software packages and being installed by users without their express permission (and no, including a blurb about the RedZee toolbar in a EULA that nobody is expected to read does not count as an opt in). In fact, one report showed that the toolbar was removed by a popular anti-adware application.

While 9,000,000 installation may have been performed over the course of the past few years, it is unlikely that even a simply majority of these people still use the toolbar or have it installed on their machines.

5. Misrepresentation of Tactics - This was elaborated upon above but it deserves repeating, stating that RedZee has a partnership with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN is a gross distortion of the facts.

6. Misrepresentation of Traffic Quality - When the question what does RedZee do to manage click-fraud was posed during our call, the rep said that RedZee has a team of engineers tasked to manage that specific aspect of the business. He did not, however, make any mention of backing our fraudulent clicks or allowing advertisers to submit server logs for investigation.

In researching RedZee, we have yet to find an advertiser who has experienced positive results with RedZee traffic. The most common experience is that RedZee sends substantial traffic that does not convert at all and that almost every "visitor" sent by RedZee views only one page of the site and bounces in a matter of seconds, traits typical of a bot or some other automated traffic generation system. One real estate agent described her experience by stating that on a site where she typically saw a 20% conversion rate from Google, she paid for 10,000 RedZee visits and did not receive a single conversion.