Web pages soon plunged in Inktomi’s search rankings and disappeared from key sites like MSN, where Inktomi feeds its listings. After he demanded to know what happened, Spooner learned from Inktomi that his site contained editorial flaws that hurt his ranking. And he would have to become a paid-inclusion customer to learn what these flaws were. All this, while his pages remained well ranked on Google. “I lost a quarter of my traffic,” says Spooner. —Ben Elgin —Web Searches: The Fix Is In  (Business Week)