[adventured]

Three reasons.

First, professional courtesy. Search was a very small world in 1998 (that is, in terms of people working in the field). There was an academic quality to the industry, with a lot of freshly minted college kids, teachers and universities involved.

Second, a stamp of confidence in their technology. That is: if we're not doing a good enough job, we deserve to lose, and here's our competition.

Third, money. Companies often paid to be listed at the bottom of search engines. In 1998 Google was still highly reliant on partners that used their search technology (they were battling eg Inktomi in this respect).

[yid]

Are you by any chance a former Inktomi developer?