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Yahoo! Launches Pay-Per-Search
vasah20 writes: "ZDNet.com has this article saying that Yahoo is starting a pay-per-search service for 'premium documents,' in attempt to offset some of its revenue losses. Maybe it's just me, but if people can already find the most relevant results on Google, what are the chances anyone's gonna use this service?"
Doesn't Yahoo use google for searching anyway?
I'm just wondering....
J.
Where on Yahoo is their pay-per-search? I can't find it. I will pay for this information.
If it's a business model they are trying to produce, they will simply remove the relevant results from the google listings. Doesn't Yahoo! own Google? Then they are *the* only way to get certain results, and oh by the way, tat will be $5.00...
According to the site, Yahoo plans to charge consumers between $1 and $4 to retrieve files from a specialized database of some 25 million research documents culled from 7,100 publications (...)
3 years ago this would have generated approximately 6 billion dollars in venture capital already. Unfortunately for Yahoo!, it's not 3 years ago.
I betcha a fair deal of people will use it (read: AOL users, computer neophytes) because the "brand name" of Yahoo is much stronger than that of Google... ;)
It probably won't last for long though, I'm sure that most people will figure it out
--The space between my ears was intentionally left blank--
Google may be next?
Who's to say they won't start charging?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Lets Google "Pay" and "Search" to see what we get.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Sorry, Yahoo. It's already been established that people won't pay for information, even when it's stuff they can't get anywhere else. Look at Salon, for example, whose subscription-based service has been a momumental disaster.
I suspect a lot of people will say that Google is the better search engine anyway, and though I agree, don't count out the sway of Yahoo's excellent categorization. However, I'm pretty sure that something will come along (maybe Vivissimo (check my spelling on that)) that will supplant's Yahoo's tried-and-true categories.
This just doesn't bode well for Yahoo. I hope they are able to stay afloat. They're still among the top ten sites for hits on the Web for sure.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
but paying-for-retrieving-premium documents returned in a search. They are licensing NorthernLight, which already had that feature.
Not too bad, if you can afford it. It's better to see your search service return non-free documents, so that at least you know they exist, that not returning them at all.
What will happen to google, then? Yahoo already dumped altavista as search engine, then, I seem to remember, hotbot, and now Google? Will they be loosing this source of revenue?
It's just a BloJJ
I cant imagine anyone but a complete and total sucker using this. Is there some...uplifting quality? I've never particurally liked Yahoo!'s business tactics, seeing as they often involved trying to steal privacy rights and the like, but this is ridiculous. Who do they honestly think will pay for this?
Logic is the ultimate device.
Carousel is a lie!
Here are your options:
1. Use Northern Light
2. Use Yahoo! and pay more than Northern Light for the same service.
Hmm
I don't think Yahoo's going to reap any profits from this venture. After checking (haven't been there in a while) it looks like "pay for search" didn't turn out to be a very lucrative business model for NL.
They think people will buy anything?... They're probably right.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
As a content generator, will *I* get a share of the $1-$4 that they will charge? Will I even be notified that my document will be considered as "premium?" This can lead to some pretty sticky legal issues, i.e., someone collecting $ for access to work posted for free.
Are their any law-officianada that are familiar with the potential copyright issues involved?
This smacks of the old AOL model, where part of the benefit of going through them as an ISP is access to their exclusive content. I doubt that yahoo has the presence to generate a "sub-internet" of exclusive documents available only for pay.
What ever are/were they thinking!
If you read the faq, and timothy's website, they clearly say that they "program" stories. So there's not a glut of stories at once, they set a specified time for it to appear.
Even if your submission is rejected before the story appears, it doesn't mean your "First Submission" was actually first.
Maybe it's just me, but if people can already find the most relevant results on Google, what are the chances anyone's gonna use this service?
Has google shown a profit yet? The thousands of CPUs, disks, and massive bandwidth have to be paid for by someone.
Trolling is a art,
Like their next quarter earnings which Google wont find ;)
I am sure Yahoo would love to give it to you for a price.
Rapid Nirvana
That's the creedo I used whenever I explained things to my internet-newbie friends and family a few years ago. If it exists online, it exists in a free format and you shouldn't pay for it. Video game news? Plenty of fan sites. Web hosting? If you're just putting up photos of your dog there are free hosting sites. And now, search...
My concern is this: Is there going to be a time when it WON'T be available for free? Already free resources are buckling under the weight of their hosting fees and the popularity that drives their bandwidth through the roof. Free sites are no longer considered totally stable. Some have corporate allies -- IMDB, for instance. Some just buckle.
Whether the answer is subscriptions or micropayments or allies or whatever, the question is what will free sites do in order to stay afloat? Or will the future of the internet have a few stable commercial services and lots of hobby sites that yo-yo in and out of existence?
Surely pay-for-search will be counter productive? Its common sense that in the business domain, the customer will always search for the lowest available price for the best service. As was pointed out, Google offer one of the best search sites on the net.
If they are wanting to offset some of their expenditure, surely it would make better business sense if they could protect these "premium documents" from search by other engines, therefore making Yahoo the only people able to search for them. Though, in my opinion, this would be not just hard to do, but the technical equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot...
WARNING: May contain traces of nut
Seem to target research/academic papers mainly.
I can see one or two advantages:
- no static. Only the research papers are searched.
- Could make a strong negotiating position to get access (and retrieve via the portal) from archives not connected to the internet
However the article doesn't actually name things like that
According to the site, Yahoo plans to charge consumers between $1 and $4 to retrieve files from a specialized database of some 25 million research documents culled from 7,100 publications, including academic periodicals. Yahoo also expects to offer a "Premium Discount Search" option of 50 documents a month for $4.95.
Interesting that they go from $1 to $4 per document (or so it seems) to $4.95 for 50 documents in a month. This seems like a suckers discount.... "gee, nobody will pay us $4 for one document, but they might pay us $4.95 for a month in which they happen to get NO documents..."
No thanks, I'll stick to Google.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Being offtopic: It happend to me, and probably to a lot of peole too! Be proud, you have been rejected by slashdot!
Long life slashdot
This can be a good idea for Yahoo! if the payment include the document you are searching for. Even if Google if what I use nowadays, and don't even remember of using others, sometimes the paper I'm looking for don't exist online and have to pay to someone. So if Yahoo, guarantees the paper, great!
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
OT: This morning noticed the United Devices Cancer Research I've been running for several months now is displaying an ad for Microsoft .net Disturbing. I thought I was contributing cycles to a good cause and United Devices is placing ads on it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Millions of people use Yahoo! every day for every possible thing you can imagine. If there was some way to poll browser configurations and see what the default start page was, I'm sure the majority would be Yahoo, followed closely by MSN (the default for IE) and then Netscape. I'm not talking about slashdot readers or other technical types, I mean every day people. An average person can seemingly do anything they'd ever need to do online without ever leaving Yahoo!, and it's almost all free. Free games, auctions, email, yellow pages, city guides, etc. Now, power users or even just slightly better than average users may not ever go to Yahoo, or if they do they branch off of it and go other places, but they realize that there's a LOT more to the internet than just Yahoo!. These people will never use the premium search feature. In my opinion, it's the millions of dedicated "internet=yahoo" people out there who logon to my.yahoo.com and check their email along with their local headlines and weather... they will be the ones who see the banner for "premium yahoo searches" and say to themselves "hey, it's yahoo, it's premium, it's got to be worth it." I think Yahoo stands to make a great deal of money off of this. I just hope they don't do anything underhanded like reduce the quality of their normal searches or leave off certain results like, say, google.com from a search of "indexing web sites."
~ now you know
I think that they're essentially talking about a Lexis/Nexis/JSTOR/etc. type of repository, with electronic content not found on the Web, or found behind subscriptions (such as Nature, etc.).
At least, I *hope* that's what they're talking about....
-baka!
From what I understand, this is NOT a pay-per-web search service, more like a pay-as-you-go version of Lexis-Nexus... Searching special-interest documents they've collected, not the general internet.
Seems like a niche that's already filled, but if they can make the premium services drop their prices a bit, that's probably a good thing.
>>Search results on the preview site are identical to those found on the paid search service offered on Northern Light's home page.
right - so the search engine is not superior so results won't be better
I also do't see how they can charge for web content that does'nt belong to them. If it's some elses copyrighted material,
stil....
perhaps they could charge for decent links to
"index of \admin"
perl -MIO::Socket -e 'IO::Socket::INET-new(PeerAddr="some.windoze.box:1
I didn't realize they still offered a search. I thought they were just chat/auction/shopping/clubs/groups/money/travel/ne ws/sports/weather/calendar/briefcase/messaging/mai l/games. Oh look, there is a search there somewhere!
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Hopefully not too far off topic here.
What are peoples thoughts on the google text ads in the right hand of the results pages? Any experience as a buyer of these? Click through rates etc...?
Search Engines have to pay the rent somehow - if the google model works for advertisers it'll work for google. Personally I seldom click on them.
This is just Yahoo trying to claw some money back. I wont be using this service - even if I was inclined to pay for results it wouldn't be Yahoo getting my money for oh so many reasons.
Although it's still in beta mode, I found Teoma to be a great search engine, and at times, be even better than Google in whatever I was searching for.
;-)) give Teoma a shot.
For any of you considering paying for this service (none hopefully
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
Time to add all Yahoo! sites to my /etc/hosts ban list. Banner ads; what's next? Sites that extort money by threatening your web-browser?
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Google's main revenue stream is from licensing its searcing technologies. It's most certainly the best search technology, but I have to wonder how solid that revenue stream is, and how long it can last. I know I wouldn't mind ad viewing for my google searches, but ads don't even provide a good revenue stream these days (do they ./?). Google or any search engine could start (or maybe already is) tracking the types of things people search for in a session, maybe requiring logins.. and then selling that information to those marketoids and information analysts.
~~~
The dumb thing is, they already require all their business sites pay a sizable sum to even get into the search directory. So not only are your search results already generated by who paid for you to see them, but now you're supposed to pay for it too?
I thought Yahoo! was supposed to sell porn and make money that way. Did that not pan out?
spacefem.com
For all those who dis the /.
/. has done nothing but make available to you a great service. Even if it's editors have done a 180 and unfairly modded or deleted your posts, what's the BFD? You are just jealous.
Whenever something really good comes along, there will always be detractors. Those who focus on the negatives and gripe incessantly. I say to you: Get a real cause.
It looks like Yahoo will only be using this search for documents which are likely to be used for research in some way. Maybe for accademic stuff, this isn't that good a value, but I'm sure if this has documents which are useful to Lawyers and its not easily searchable anywhere else, its got the ability to make some kind of profit. $5 is nothing if you think of an hourly rate if it means you are not going to spend 10-20 minutes searching through crap on the web. It sounds like this is going to be targetted at the people who aren't web experts and might not know the best way to do a search, or to use Google in the first place.
If they market this right it could get them entrenched in a niche area which could be all they want for now, especially if that niche includes a large group to whom $5 for a search isn't going to be a problem.
Actually the documents are from buying out the Northern Light database, which is no longer free to the public either.
http://premium.search.yahoo.com/
Thank you Mr.Gates. Yes we've suspected your real name for some time now despite your cleaver handle.
For real theft look at how much MS paid for the ideas it "borrowed" from Mozilla
Google, barring any financial woes, seems like the logical successor to Yahoo in the category game, but they categary organization and search, IMO, is not nearly as good as Yahoo's yet. It has the potential, though, if they would spend some resources developing it. We already know what they are capable of.
If NorthernLight has been doing this for quite some time, and they are selling out, why would Yahoo! think they are going to succeed where others, with original ideas, have failed?
Also, can Yahoo! do anything on their own? License from Google, copy ebay and Hotmail etc etc.
Is this a competitive effort against Lexis-Nexis against documents NOT currently indexed in Yahoo ?
If it is this is a good thing for Yahoo and its users, IF they are going to charge for documents already in the Yahoo search database then it sucks and they are ruining their core business.
Yahoo is one of the oldest, although I could never ever figure out why people liked it , I can never find a damm thing Im looking for there, google, no problem, prior to that HotBot,
Lexis-Nexus used to charge big bucks for this same type of "premeium" indexing, Im not sure anymore, but I doubt it has changed, this has been an invaluable tool for projects I worked on involving trade journals, and Industry specific news, much of which is still not publised to the web.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
This service is, of course, ridiculous. For one thing, you have to buy a document before you can read it, which means that you have to lay out money without knowing whether or not a document will be useful.
Secondly, the target market for such a service should be academics (particularly college students), who are legally allowed to copy articles for free. Not to mention the fact that they generally have very little money to spend on such services and have access to extensive library resources (both physical and online) for free.
Just who does Yahoo think is going to pay money for magazine articles that are a few years old?
But hey, if people choose to pay for it, Yahoo will choose to charge for it...
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
They say their database would consist of 25 millions of docs taken from 7100 magazines you'd usually have to pay for.
So, unless Google actually offer a significant document base (in terms of quality, not of quantity), there is no concurrence, here.
this service could be invaluable for students, researchers documentalists, librarians, journalists who want to know more about the tech info they want to publish...
So, yeah, this could work, if the money is also used to retribute the documents authors (which'd authorize their indexation/publication).
Of course, such a functionality is not aimed at the public but just at its scientific subset.
I just hope they'll offer some test queries to try-and-eventually-adopt such thing.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Isn't Northern Light striking a deal with the CIA and shutting down its public search engine? or was that disinformation?
Didn't Infoseek originally have "pay for search" services, back in 1995?
I don't think that worked then, nor will this work now. Yahoo, instead of advancing the technology of their search engine, or marketing the integrity of their category listings (you get less hits but the sites that you find from Yahoo were quality ones), they are trying to suck every cent out of what they have.
Google has FAR passed them by. Their search algorhythm seems to be able to offer the best of both worlds, automated indexing AND good quality results.
Yahoo needs to either find a better form of that (which would greatly reduce their labor costs), or else BUY Google.
Already, their pay for listing has destroyed the integrity of their category listings. Pay for search will just eat up what little respectibility they have left.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Yahoo uses their technologies, so does many companies who can afford one of the best search technology on the planet. I bet Yahoo is one of their biggest customer. So I believe Yahoo makes some cash and keep feeding google so we have google for free.
if people can already find the most relevant results on Google, what are the chances anyone's gonna use this service?
I'd say they're pretty good. I love google, and use it exclusively. But even if Google gives you "relevant" results, there may be things on the Yahoo index that a crawler may not be able to access. And even though it's very good, it's still only a crawler -- I get the impression that Yahoo is using humans to do this.
I know that when I was in college, starting a research paper 8 hours before it was due, I would have gladly paid their quoted $1-4 per "premium" document rather than having to sift through crap to find what I wanted.
Hey, I'm all for this! As long as I can first see what I'm getting and then decide whether I want to pay or not. ;)
alt.binaries.erotica.hamster.ducktape
Excellent post! To take it one step further, how much is all the free information worth to you? Some would argue that they already pay for the content of the internet when they pony up fees for their connection or ISP. So should the answer be that a portion of our monthly connection fees pay for services like Yahoo and /.? Personally, I feel like if the service is worth it, I want to support it the best I can. 9 times out of 10 that means forking over a little cash.
I went from astavista -> yahoo -> google... as long as there's at least one half-assed search engine out there, I live with it. Google is extremely clean, in fact it's a luxury. But if I had to live with one full of banners and pop-up (-down) ads, I would too (Or well, my junkbuster would have to live with them :}). And if hell froze over and there really weren't any good engines left, I'd want to pay for something like google. But if Google started taking subscriptions or micropayments or whatever today, no way. I don't see their costs rising either, rather going down as everything gets cheaper, and the net isn't getting *that* much bigger, at least not in the terms of searchable text, but rather of P2P programs and huge program files (demos, trial versions, trailers, warez, appz, mp3s, divx etc.)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I guess paying for a search wouldn't be all that bad if it increased relivance greatly. It'd be nice to find exactly the information you need on the first of second search... and only have documents displayed in the list that are relivant (search for information on cow's milk and click on a page that brings you to "Farmer Bob's Big Teen Udders")
Only catch is.... how do you define a relivant document... how does yahoo know exactly what i'm lookin for unless i put in exact keywords...
... but then again i could do that at google, hotbot, free yahoo, or watever.
And, you'd really hafta reindex the documents, but having a human actually look at the content... i can put all the meta keywords and description i want in a page and still not have it anywere near relivant... and to pay ppl to do that's gonna be more expensive... so doesn't seem very cost effective.
...because it seems to rely on little more than inertia to succeed. People use Yahoo! to search, therefor people will pay Yahoo! to search?
Hm. Er. No. The Yahoo general searches will still be free (for finding public material), while the Yahoo specialized search of research articles, etc., will not be free.
I use Google for my searching. When it doesn't turn up what I want, or when I need a particular citation, I fire up my lexis-nexis account. I would imagine that anyone who does serious research will do the same. This way, people who have always used Yahoo will continue to use Yahoo (unless driven away by worries of the entire service becoming pay-based?), and will, for serious research, use lexis-nexis. Their pay-as-you-go pricing is affordable enough for the occasional user, and their daily/weekly pricing falls into about what you'd expect if you're using this is a corporate resource. They're also a company that actually turns a profit, and has a very solid reputation. Not to mention that most organizations that require extensive research already maintain a lexnex account for their employees to make use of.
And I'd reckon it's easier to get a PO approved to Lexis-Nexis for searching purposes than it is for Yahoo!. They branded themselves as fun and off-beat. Fun and off-beat do not a good reference source make.
Oh well. This doesn't affect me in the slightest, I just don't see it working. They were early-to-market with their portal, but they're late-to-market with this, and I don't believe inertia from the portal / general search will carry over to this realm.
-l
Remember that yahoo decided to branch off from being a "pure" search engine (e.g. "google") to become more of a web portal. I think yahoo is still trying to be profitable as a "web portal" (e-mail, shopping, chat) company, and part of its "portal" services will be a pay websearch service. However, IMHO, I doubt it will be very profitable against a free engine like google, or the other competition (altavista, excite, hotbot, )
If yahoo really wanted to make a profit on its search engine capabilities, it should have advertising like google, but it would point to yahoo sponsored sites, such as its shopping network or yahoo member pages. Then yahoo should charge a small commission for each sale done through its site (ala ebay)...
Me email iz skyewalkerluke at microsoft's free email service.
First those who are (like the /. readers) the advanced one.. those who don't pay as they know where to find freeware and only pay for what doesn't exist elsewhere...
The other group of people is those withour experience of the net. Those who will pay for a service like that on yahoo as they are lost on google or they don't know it exist...
Internet business is not to make money from the geek.. but for the 'normal' people...
"Tui Nati vulnerati."
So does this mean that they are reserving their best searches for paying customers? Basically, they'd be going to a lot of trouble to make their free service worse. Sounds like a really bad idea, I don't think anyone would ever pay extra for searches that are standard at best and often sub-par.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
In latest issue of Details magazine there's an article on Google. As I recall the made 50 million last year: selling ad keywords. So yes, they are profitable, in fact, it is one of the only start ups that is actually profitable.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
The way this is worded, it seems you can freely search for documents, and if you find a document you'd like to view, then you pay to see it. The article specifically cites academic journals, so this is probably more like LexisNexis in that the documents are electronic versions of print journal articles.
Are people willing to pay for this? Compared to the alternatives of subscribing to LexisNexis (if their journal databases overlap), or obtaining the print copy, the convenience of being able to download the article is probably worth it to many people. As someone who does academic research, I know I would. Fortunately, my alma matter (which I have access to as an alumnus) has a subscription to NexisLexis. If Yahoo's offering complements or surpasses that, then they have a probable customer in me.
I think this is a good thing, not just for Yahoo, but for the Internet as a whole. This lays down the beginnings of some infrastructure for a possible future involving micropayments. We're getting a step closer to Ted Nelson's docuverse.
No of course not! This argument has already been fought as the deep linking issue. All that Yahoo is doing, as is any other search engine, is to act as a directory. If this were to be the case, say good-bye to the Web.
from the northern light web site: As of January 18, Northern Light has been acquired by divine, inc. By joining Northern Light's premium content services, enterprise search technology, and e-commerce transaction engine with divine's integrated content, collaboration and knowledge solutions, we are able to provide the comprehensive information tools that can give you an edge in a challenging marketplace. so it's not really likely to be cheap anymore I guess
Ok, 98%. If I couldn't find a good link, then I'd visit google or the other engines.
I no longer visit Yahoo!.
Why?
X10 pop up ads.
After seeing them for a week, I said "Wait a sec. Why am I here? (for searches) Can I get this somewhere else w/o the pop-up ads? (yes)" Then I left Yahoo!
Pay to search will end up with the same reaction. Until EVERYONE is charging for searches, thoes who charge will loose traffic to those who do not.
For Yahoo! its great.
1) Ads no longer bring in $. (so who needs eyeballs)
2) Yahoo pays for the seaches AND for the bandwidth. Charging means less eyeballs therefore less bandwidth and less search fees.
In the stock news on Yahoo, about 1/8th of the news articles had a vague headline to a subscription finance news service. Now checking stock news, these news links no longer exist. If the lack of these headlines means anything (dead) then Yahoo may have to look at the path taken by others in the field to not repeat the same mistakes.
The truth shall set you free!
According to the site, Yahoo plans to charge consumers between $1 and $4 to retrieve files from a specialized database of some 25 million research documents culled from 7,100 publications, including academic periodicals. Yahoo also expects to offer a "Premium Discount Search" option of 50 documents a month for $4.95.
No, you can't get that for free from Google.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
What really gets me is the way Google keeps introducing major improvements with a minimum of publicity. Yeah, they attract attention when they add conspicuous features like the Usenet archive and image searching. But it's really a bigger deal when they quietly improve their stop-word and wildcard handling. Contrast this with their competitors, which announce every little tweak as if it were the Return of the King.
Maybe Google is afraid their competitors will notice what Google is doing right and the others are doing wrong. But they can't hide the fact that they're the only search engine turning a profit!
A specialised database means that it would be a very different thing, I suspect, than the type of general web database offered by Google - especially if the content is not publically accessible on the web. Different material than Google, and presumably "filtered".
I do wonder though - how would this differ from the existing CD Databases which most (if not all) university libraries have of journal articles? Would it be bigger? Or is the issue that it is cheap enough for the general public to be useful without the universities subsidising your access? Or would it have different material? I assume the latter, as I figure it would combine free online materials with journal articles and work from other pulications.
Mind you, I wouldn't pay for it. I use google for general stuff, and journal databases for the rest. I don't think I need a third alternative. I suspect that most students are the same, so unless they plan to offer a subscription service to universities, I wonder if there will be enough of a target demographic for tehre to be a point.
vasah20 writes: "ZDNet.com has this article saying that Yahoo is starting a pay-per-search service for 'premium documents,' in attempt to offset some of it's revenue losses.
Hey, someone tell vasah20 that the singular possesive of "it" is "its", not "it's"
The model has always been that masses of information and content -- ever increasing volumes of it -- will be totally free, and that the value add, where you can charge money, will be for the "enhanced" content. People who try to charge for commodity content fail. To make it in this market you need a distinctive offering with consistent high quality and a market with a clear economic need for what is being offered.
This Yahoo pay-service has got to be pitched to businesses and professionals. Who else would pay for it? If so, then it's got to compete against the likes of Lexis-Nexis, D&B, Dialog, Delphion, etc., etc. Theoretically possible, but I don't see my company's librarian pushing for this any time soon unless Yahoo establishes a compelling reason to sign up. Most companies that pay for these services already pay for subscriptions that probably overlap what Yahoo has to offer in this category. Nobody is going to want to pay twice for access to the same content. I guess we'll see.
Google as their search engine anyway?
~.Evanrude
I realize that Slashdot loves to make stupid snide comments, but this is certainly not a "second rate search." Had CmdrTaco even bothered to do a single search he would have seen that the content is coming from subscription magazines and journals -- content that you can't get from Google because it's for-pay content. But far be it from Slashdot to do any sort of investigation.
rooooar
That makes me wonder which free services are next on the "chopping block". There's email, clubs, groups, start pages, web space... did I forget anything?
but isn't that what Red Hat and a half dozen other re-distributors of "public domain" ala free software already do? ie charge a fee for providing added value (in the RH case, the CD, the packaging, the time and effort that went into it).
So by the same token, Yahoo can charge a fee for all the time they spend categorizing content and maintaining a directory...
-farshad
...and remember in your brain boggle, wrong starts with a wubble-u.
I don't think people on the Slashdot or internet are so nice, as your subject implies.
Perhaps you meant to say something like:
...The first group of people who will find the free porn.
...The other group of people will pay for a service to find porn.
Why doesn't Yahoo do consulting? As far as I'm concerned they've managed to master the art of lightweight yet highly functional web sites, as well as having a pretty impressive infrastructure.
I'm sure there are some businesses that would love to have an intranet that used Yahoo technology. And I'm sure there are also a lot that would love to outsource their extranet filesharing to someone with a good infrastructure and known how-to.
It seems like a better idea than trying to make money off the internet itself.
Question I have is this: if you search and can't find the document then do you get a refund?
You start charging for content -- searches, text, whatever -- you suddenly raise the bar. You can't expect people to "pay for searching" if the success rate isn't incredibly high.
Besides -- with very few exceptions -- does anyone actually buy into the idea of "premium content?" Lately, I see a lot of sites charging for premium content. But when you actually poke around and try to figure out the content, you discover a lot of lame videos, lame games, and generally uninspired content. (I'm thinking here of some of Real.com's "premium" offerings.)
True, the Wall Street Journal -- and other content specific sites like it -- are exceptions, but a *search engine?*
Cripes, you're not even paying for the content, as I understand this -- you're paying for some sort of advanced search algorithm. I mean, if you're paying for the content -- and they actually know where the content is -- then why not simply offer up the content and skip the whole "premium search" idea?
I don't get it. But I do know this: whenever most websites start talking about "premium" stuff, it usually means that they're close to going bankrupt.
Another example:
Salon.com. I went ahead and signed up a one-month subscription. I figued it'd be nice to get all of Salon in a single PDF file. Well, it *was* nice. But now I realize that size of "Salon Daily" in PDF is shrinking -- drastically. Yesterday, I think it was down to about 8 pages -- and not even all the stories on their website were actually in the PDF. (And the formatting for interviews is non-existent, so there's no way to distinguish the question from the answer -- which, in the case of last week's Noam Chomsky interview, was incredibly disconcerting (since Noam sounded as though he'd drunk a six-pack of Pabst and was spouting off any old shit that zipped through his head. One of the weirdest interviews I've ever read. But I digress...)
And yet another example of screwed up premium content:
Tivo. I hear now Tivo has partnered up with Real (I thought it was a joke, too, but then I read the press release) and see that they're going to recycle the stale videos and stale audio on Real's site into my Tivo. Wonderful. And then -- as if that wasn't enough to make you lose all faith in Tivo -- they've partnered up with (drum roll) some company that makes the 'You Don't Know Jack' game. Please. Like I want some 5 year old game being pumped down my wires just so Tivo can say they've conquered the living room?
It's interesting, but the real premium content -- the stuff that would actually make "premium" worth a premium price, IMHO -- is nowhere near being available -- and that's the "jukebox in the sky" idea (any song, on any computer, anywhere) or the "any concert, anytime, anywhere" idea. I'd gladly pay 10 bucks a month to see quality concerts streamed on-line. But not stale old recycled stuff. Up-to-the-minute stuff. Like being able to catch Dylan from the night before. Or whoever. Concert-at-glance type stuff. That's interesting. It's not worth a *lot* of money, but it'd be compelling content.
Ditto for the jukebox-in-the-sky.
But paying for some search engine?
Please. I bet even the Yahoo suits are scratching their heads and wondering how, exactly, to deliver "premium searching." I mean, maybe someone tries it out once because they're looking for a specific document -- like I coulda used a premium search not long ago when I was looking to compare miniDV cameras and wanted to see all the PDF manuals of my top-3 wishlist cameras -- but that's about it. (Of course, I couldn't find any of the manuals on-line.)
Or maybe to find some old on-line manual for the garbage disposal underneath your sink that has that little button on the bottom of the disposal unit and you wonder what the hell that button is for because it doesn't seem to do anything when you press it.
So... a shitty search engine pays to use Googles technology (which we can use for free), to become less shitty?
Can`t think why so many tech companies have been going bust!
Unless you are offering services to corporations, the internet is not a place to be trying to make money. We saw this in the thousands of .com startups that went belly up over the last two years. No one wants to pay for something they can get for free, and everyone wants free. We saw this in the service wars.
$20 a month providers lost businessw to $14 a month providers, followed by $10 a month and then free (with banner) companies. But everyone wants it cheaper, and even the banner sites started loosing business when people found hacks to remove the banners.
The internet is not a great place to try and make money. The whole idea of the internet was to bring everyone and everything together, and make it easy and cheap.
I can not see yahoo making much, if any money off of this. The only way to make money is to make a pay service that is worth more than the free services. That is why ebay works. There are plenty of free auctions sites all over. But ebay provides insurance, provides extra features to make things easier, that is why ebay turns profit. Yahoo had better have some reall person doing my searches for me manualy for $4 a search.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Fuck you Yahoo.
Google here I come!
algorhythm n. a set of rules for describing the synchronous movements of the human body in response to an audible harmonic stimulus, such as music. ;-)
Fried ice cream is a reality. - George Clinton
A few examples of companies that have been doing quite well selling information:
-Lexus/Nexus
-Time Magazine
-The Wall Street Journal
People have been paying for information for a long time and they will continue to do so. To judge the validity of such schemes based on the success and failure of a bunch of dot com's doesn't really account for the true nature of this market.
What we've really seen in the world of internet information is a failure of ad based revenue models. Everybody believed they could give everything away for free but then make money on advertising. But there were so many outlets for advertising and the audiences were so dispersed that these models quickly fizzled out. Those sites that coninute to post worthwhile content will continue to see ad revenue and will be able to establish subscriber bases over the long term.
Personally I pay for a salon subscription because I like the content and consider it worth the money to keep them in business. Also, can you explain to my why you believe Salon's subscription service is a disaster? Last time I checked they were still in business.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
This may come as a shock, but a ton of people have *NEVER HEARD* of google. It's the web page I send people to here at work when they are having connectivity problems because I know it won't be cached. Yahoo is banking on this, as well as the fact that people who use the service won't want to change. Yahoo has dropped a ton of money on publicity, how much has google dropped? The common unwashed masses will use this...watch and see...
Sent from your iPad.
I use Yahoo every day - but never for web searches. The Reuters news feed, stock quotes, and movie listings are as good as anybody's and the Akamai distribution is excellent. Lately I've been playing Java applet based card games there. It's a quality site with a lot to offer.
"...what are the chances anyone's gonna use this service?"
Ah, ahcohordingaling to my expert, with the TI calculator and the number crunching, calculations the chances are 3.
This
... they aren't in this case. Yahoo isn't out to charge for access to your web page via their portal, but rather it would seem that they're creating a cheap alternative to something like Lexis Nexis, which, in in my opinion, could be a horribly valuable asset for, say, high school debate teams that can't afford $600/year and up that Lexis-Nexis charges. There are very few players in the online document provision market - and none with the ability to provide affordable content that Yahoo! has. They see this and are taking advantage of it in another attempt to reach profitability.
i don't know how those amazing business brains do it!! What top idea will they come up with next? how about _charging_ people to see banner ads?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
One thing that's been rolling around in my brain for a while is the notion of using P2P to provide content for the net without the issues associated with centralized servers. The slashdot effect is evidence of what's wrong with the current model of distribution. If all of that content could be picked up from some more local resource rather than having to go to a central server, you'd solve a lot of problems (system bandwidth, hosting costs, etc).
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Northernlight.com does this for a while. They actually disconinued (or are about to) the free
site. Northern Light does not charge for stuff you
can lookup on Google. But they do have a number
of proprietary databases you can search.
There is also "manual" search services like Smartwebsearch.
---- join dshield.org Distributed Intrusion Detec
Even if just a really really small portion of the Yahoo! visitors are willing to pay for searches, Yahoo! will earn a lot of money.
I wonder how many visitors they have each day?
Ciryon
Yahoo will not offer a pay-per search (ZDNet's mistake, repeated by Slashdot) but a pay-per-view service for academic papers.
Since most academic papers are copyrighted by publishers and charged for, there is no way that Yahoo or Google or Slashdot anybody else could offer such a service for free. (without throwing away money)
go to advanced serch from yahoo home page..
yahoo premium search is a nice thing to have. They have a collaboration with some sites, whose documents can be bought as mentioned in the news. Help on premium document search can be found here. And a list of all "qualifying documents" can be found here
I don't doubt that not many people will be eager to use this service. But looking at what's going on, it may be an indication that a lot of services offered on the internet, for which we are used to seeing them as free, will no longer be such. Google, for example, is trying to make money in several different ways -- selling link placement, licensing searches to Yahoo, licensing searches to any web site. If this does not bring in enough money for them, the only logical place to draw cach from would be the consumers (people that search; advertizing exposure is not good enough). The well established internet companies (such as Yahoo, Google) want to start making (more significant) profit.
If Yahoo, Google or others don't start making more significant profits, they will remain relatively small companies, and may be swallowed by some large entity, such as MS, AOL. And perhaps they don't want that. I know, I don't want that.
I am affraid that Yahoo may be setting a precedent that may be followed by many others, including Google.
Having spent a lot of time in The University library over the last couple of years, I'd commend Yahoo on a good move. Academic journals are an interesting little world. Often the subscription cost exceeds circulation, eg. $900 per year, circulation 800. Currently database services which include articles from these journals tend to follow a similar marketing concept, often charging $15 - $20 dollars per article. If Yahoo is able to provide these same articles for $1 to $4 that would be a huge benefit for many struggling grad students.
Hopefully the benefit will also trickle down to the general public as the lowered cost of access to research makes it easier to apply research in practice.
macfixit.com is doing it now, now yahoo? jeesh, its like the napster thing, who would pay for napster when there are hundreds of other ways? hotline, ftp, all the open source projects.. the line is infinite...
I can only see a few old people doing this, sending in cheques monthly to pay for "premium" searches or napster downloads.. They are exploiting the old!
Before everyone goes off an say that they will never pay for a search engine, please understand what Yahoo's plan is.
Yahoo isn't planning on charging for the searches that you do on its portal now, like the searches for the web pages. What they are offering for a fee is the stuff that you cannot find on any websites out there, where the publishers make them unavailable for free. Yahoo is moving towards the market that Lexis-Nexis is in now.
Many of you claim that this plan is unprofitable or nobody is going to pay for it. Think about this. Lexis Nexis charges $9/law review articles, $3/newspaper article, $4-12/SEC filings, or $129/week for Business news package. My school is paying into the 10K+ range for a site license per year.
This is definitely a highly profitable area.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Isn't this just another Lexis-Nexis or JSTOR.
ÕÕ
why go out for hamburgers?
Yahoo is sitting on a gold mine of data. By creating a group of engineers to data mine their link database, Yahoo could make a bloody fortune. Users aren't the cash cow here -- corporations are. Companies regular throw goofy sums of cash into marketing and Yahoo could get fat feeding at that corporate tit. I wrote more about this in my use.perl.org journal some months ago.
Punishing users who only make their data richer makes about as much sense as interstate tariffs.
Come on, you aren't a premium content provider. You wont have that problem, your on slashdot. Even if you did have good content, you're giving it away to other people, they're just selling the information of how to get to your site, if you want a cut it's your responsibility to charge everyone who comes to your site.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I just use Webcrawler. I always find what I am looking for.
Who is going to use this? If these "research documents" are truely from "academic publications" shouldn't the biggest audience these "documents" already have access to them through their respective academic institutions or research firms.
Even as a graduate student who reads at least a dozen reaserch articles per week I wouldn't consider using this service. It is much easier to use the FREE service provided by my academic institution. Also, I highly doubt that Joe Normal desires to read the research articles in this week's Science. So where are the customers?
IMHO, This sounds like another nail in the coffin for Yahoo.
Any comments?
why would yahoo launch a special pay-per-search? There are so many free search sites that nobody would bother. Unless yahoo bought them all and restricted their infomation.
It's the first reply! And an informative one at that. Stupid fucking moderators. Well, unless you count Hemos as being redundant... ;^)
Yahoo needs to offset its losses just like everyone else...
Start a porn site.
Come on, Yahoo, get with the picture.
-
RA7
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
Who thinks that a paid search with the current level of technology just will not work?
People only going to be paying for documents that can be found, and every failed search is going to lose them money.
Given that these are technical/research documents it is a fair bet that the target audience already know how to get access to them, probably for free as well.
How do you compete with that and make money out of it?
Well you could license in better technology to improve your hit rate - Google is one of the best search engines out there and yet that still has holes in its ability to get what everyone wants every time...
e.g.
Try searching for a phrase in quotes and watch as good strips out the common words rendering your phrase useless. (yes i know you can counter this by using +'s but why should i have to do this for a phrase search?)
If you try hard enough you can find a phrase that when google is done with it results in just one word. And i'll be damned if i can remember the phrase i wanted searched for...
At the moment IMHO search engine technology is very good but it is just being outgrown by the increase in content that needs to be captured to provide a top-notch search-to-hit ratio.
Maybe the solution is to have a two tiered search concept;
the free searches are just like they are now - you get a response in real-time and take your chances that the results do not match what you actually wanted.
the paid searches are not real-time, but depending on how much you are willing to pay you get a corresponding fast result ranging anywhere from a few hours up to a few days.
for your money you get a better service (including the ever popular boolean searches, regular expressions etc if you just want to use this like a big full-text index) which you could focus much tighter than is currently possible to get a decent set of urls, summaries, and reports at the end of the process.
We've all been there - we want something very hard to find and which results in a lot of mis-matches on search engines. if someone said they could get me a few urls which are directly related to my search in a few days then I'd pay a few dollars for that!
Actually, my new copy of Linux Journal came in the mail today. Doc Searls interviews Google's Director of Marketing in one of his columns. In it, he asks if Google makes money, and she says that they are in fact profitable. She goes on to say that their revenue is split 50/50 from ad sales and technology licensing (like with Yahoo and such). She said that have 130-odd customers for their search technology, and European and Asian sales offices opening soon. Customers pay for the bandwidth and servers. Actual customers who buy an actual product. A novel business model, wouldn't you say?
Anyway, since she was interviewed before the magazine went to press, I'd be comfortable in saying that Google has been profitable for at least 45 days.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
There is no way I'd sign up for that. Everything's on Google anyway.
My Grandma always said "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?". Seems I can now revamp that statement to "Why buy the hunk of cow's manure when all you really want is the milk?"
ridiculous.....
The Only Person Willing to be Me is ME!
I might not paying a dollar or so, but I can't afford spending $6/month for each site I find something useful on.
It's just like paying for music. I generally don't mind paying $12-$14 for a music CD that has 3 or more songs on it I like, but most of the time I only want one song - which doesn't justify me paying the full price of the CD. So I don't.
Another problem is available alternatives - If Google was the only search engine available and charged, I would probably pay for it. Since there are many good alternatives that are free (at the moment), I don't feel like shelling out the money. Alas, I still haven't applied this philosophy to my choice of operating systems, but I have more and more reasons every day...
I just ran a quick test:
c brecid=IX20020102010744647&.yid=E7ytyoHpsh9NUw--&. yts=20020123170434&.ys=fd6nrZJW4hpvuok4HT_OC_6HJvw -
http://yhlib.northernlight.com/AbServ?p=research&
To view the results will cost me: $180!!
wow! now that is better than a banner any day!
The two rules for success are:
1) Never tell them everything you know.
Yahoo will offer a pay-per-view service for reading academic articles. There is no free alternative for that!
... to read the article, I'll post this reply to this highly overrated lame attempt at a joke. The article says:
According to the site, Yahoo plans to charge consumers between $1 and $4 to retrieve files from a specialized database of some 25 million research documents culled from 7,100 publications, including academic periodicals. Yahoo also expects to offer a "Premium Discount Search" option of 50 documents a month for $4.95.
So it's like Lexis/Nexis.
- Have a picture
Please mod the parent up.
Next story on Slashdot: "Slashdot editors fail to do basic fucking research into their own stories again: News at 11"
-Legion
Two-thirds of Google's revenue is from ads. They are opening new sales offices (e.g. Germany), but slowing down tech hiring. That suggests they are betting on increasing ad revenue at a time when their competitors have decided that ads alone can't sustain search-engines. Google's techie hiring cutback also suggests that they don't think additional software R&D can help them grow as much as investing in non-tech areas. [Estimates I've seen of Google's revenues are US$30M - $70M a year, with their CEO saying that makes them just about profitable.]
Worse for Google, they hold few patents for their basic technological advantage, and their infrastructure (including their huge database) could be rebuilt in a few weeks by a cash-rich M$. The only protection they have against Teoma et al is their staff -- but loyalty can be bought. (Google uses options to encourage employees to stay. If the options cease to look promising, some people will leave.)
Another problem facing Google is their staff itself. 50 of their 250 employees are PhD's. That means they have lots of valuable technical knowledge, but it also means that 50 of their highest-paid employees have a collective 0 years experience in business planning. Consider that their senior management lacks a CFO at all, and is loaded with CS doctors who tend (like normal geeks) to want to work on "cool" things instead of profitable ones.
Google's proud of its lack of advertising -- but don't they also lack the marketing that would produce such advertising? Look at two of recent new products: the USENET database (cool, but what good does it do for *Google*?), and the shopping-catalog database (a possible money source...but very risky, requiring licensees to share their revenue stream and catalog-shoppers to change their habits.)
Being private means Google can avoid stockholder demand for quick profits...sort of. Their only source of funds is two VC firms, since the founders had little money of their own. The two firms [1][2]-- each of whom has a seat on Google's board -- will eventually demand return on their $25 million investment. Remember, the folks who gave Google its money want to see profits, and have *lots* of experience in tweaking start-ups to generate them.
Don't get me wrong -- Google's great;Brin & Page deserve copious kudos & cash. However, I'm watching for some danger signs:
- Lots of new "Sales" or commission-based positions at company
- An exodus of employees. (With their high retention rate, "exodus" might mean 10 people.)
- Research efforts into non-Linux infrastructure.
- A lot of new product offerings that target consumers directly.
I'm also watching for signs I'd consider *good*:- A removal of one (or both) founders from day-to-day operations.
- More parterships with content producers.
- Another level of financing (demonstrating VC belief that they can grow.)
Whew! (my $rant->time_complete=now();)The until-now-free Macintosh web site MacFixit.com is going subscription for similar reasons. Even though it's not as vulnerable to consumer fickleness as Yahoo, it's still dependent on its consumers for its information. The problem is that if you want to charge, you have to provide added value for the money. Otherwise the consumer will move to the free sites or even USENET.
...you search for a cheaper search engine?
Probably not considered a "Premium" document, huh?
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
This could be tricky if other search engines
follow suit.
Boy, we sure didn't see this one coming. We thought we were going to pay for content...
Turns out, we are going to pay to find the content.
(1) NY Times - best paper in the world; $0.25 / day.
(2) Google - gets me there quickly; also usenet portal; $0.25 / day
It seems to me that "premium content" means professional reports on a specific topic, like market research reports (which can be very pricey). It doesn't look like you'll get "Joe and Bob's Consummate List of the IMF Bailouts and Fried Chicken Recipes" hosted by GeoCities when looking up information on the current Argentinean crisis. If I was doing professional research I would probably turn to a premium search engine to get solid data without the chafe. Google would not be able to provide the same reports unless they end up published on a public server somewhere.
Yes: You can probably get the information for free.
No: You cannot get the information as quickly for free.
This is a service targeted at corporations and their information hounds, not for your average Joe InternetUser.
I used to work for the Technology Intelligence group at USWest (yeah, yeah... the (ex)phone company.), and we subscribed to about 6 services like this. Sure, I could have found my information through free means, and sometimes I did. But when the Powers That Be need information on that technology that hasn't made it through the mainstream media, and they need it yesterday... You can't spend the time floundering around, hoping that you'll find it with google.
Remember the old adage, "Time is Money". Yahoo is selling people time, which in the business world is often worth more than $1-$4 per search.
From the viewpoint of a person working in a research institution, what Yahoo is doing is not too innovative, nor is it any kind of a cheap money making scam. If (IF) Yahoo actually will be searching research databases, then it will be doing what other not-so-popular, non-internet-based search engines/databases have provided for a few decades. I'm talking about databases like SciFinder, Beilstein Crossfire, and Web of Science. These are databases that major institutions pay tens of thousands of dollars for each year so that they can have access to records of past research data from across the world. The only difference that I can see here is that Yahoo will be providing the service as a pay-per-search service, not a yearly fee like most other databases do.
In addition, this provides us nerds with the possibility of getting our very own copy of research classics, like
Nature, 2 April 1953, VOL 171,737 1953
:?)
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
from doing the same thing? If google ever started to charge (how DO they make money?) there's always teoma.com and wisenut.com (both very good)
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Pay-for-search databases are doing quite well, last I checked. More profitable than Google seems to be, at any rate. Thing is, they don't target the mass public, because that does fail. Rather, they target particular audiences--from, say, undergraduate research writers to contract law attorneys--who need some reassurance as to the validity of the material.
My experience is that getting a copy of an article costs at least $10 if it isn't in one of the several databases my institution subscribes to, and even then it'll take at least a day, more likely three or four, for it to get to me. If I can search Yahoo for free and find that article, I'd be more than happy to pay $20 to have it delivered immediately; 4 dollars is a steal.
The interesting thing here is that Yahoo looks to be creating an ancillary service to the established databases. That is, "if you don't find it where you normally search, why not try searching for it here?" There have been numerous times when the databases I have access to don't have a particular text online, but others do. The option to pay for each access--rather than having a monthly fee paid by the institute--seems novel to me. Get a number of people each month paying for a few articles which they happened to find at Yahoo, each paying out of their own funds without realizing how many others are doing the same, and Yahoo could easily make more than a site-license's worth of revenue.
They just need to find those articles unavailable elsewhere.
For a long time, Yahoo! was seemingly ignoring the free "add URL" things they were getting and only adding to the directory those entries that were accompanied by their $199 "premium" service which guaranteed that they would look at your entry.
Now they've gone to a $299/year RECURRING fee for listing.
Me: Wow this is a really good article... *scrolls down*
Salon.com: Did you like this article? Read the rest of it after a subscription...
Me: Nooooooooooooooo! *pulls hair out*
Not that I have anything against subscription services, but I admit I got used to alot of stuff being free.
On the other hand, if you want research documents, try out NEC's Research Index. It's really quite good, I met one of the guys who put it together and talked about the theory behind it. Plus, I got a couple papers in the database.
Humorless sig goes here.
Searches? Strange, I never liked Yahoo. I prefer Dr. Pepper.
It appears that yahoo is using the same data and engine that Northern LIght is using.
If you do a very specific search (someting that produces limited hits) on both sites the result is exactly the same, right down to the price, Doc size and ID, citation info and so on.
Even the order that they list the results is the same.
-Lou
There have been plenty of posts about how much better google is for searching, but check out the "Custom" column here at googles "pay for services chart"
http://www.google.com/services/web_compare.html
Yahoo's already paying google to do it's searching (yahoo just does directory + extras) . . isn't that kinda cheating google?
You're paying for it outright through tuition payments. If you're in a state school, the government is paying for it by their subsidy of your reduced-rate tuition. Or, if you're like most grad students whose tuition is covered as part of their stipend, you're paying for it by getting paid slave wages for the highly skilled work of a research assistant or TA.
In the end, it's the government that pays for (my guess) 95 percent of academic publications. They subsidize the research, they supplement tuitions, they pay for financial aid, they fund libraries. All this could be done much more cost-effectively if the government would fund a central online repository for all scholarly research. Instead of journal publishers (and sites like Yahoo, Questia, and Lexis-Nexis) profiting from scholarly research, those government funds could be used to make the research reports freely available for everyone.
Unfortunately, too many people are making too much money from the present arrangement, so its unlikely that it'll ever happen.
ScienceSeeker.org
Yea, but will they still charge the content creator to have their content show up fist in the search results?
Wouldn't that be kinda like double dipping?
So what if I am searching for something, do I have to pay before I can search, or do I have to pay only if the article I want is found and I would like to read it?
You can't handle the truth.
The difference between their business models is that Google hopes to get paid by the content creators while Yahoo hopes to get paid by the content users.
The chance of this working with search engines like google being around is around the %1 range...
Brielle
Because if you purchased a document and it turned out to be useless, you just request a refund and get one -- no questions asked. I found that policy encouraged me to download more articles because I wasn't afraid of duds. It was all on the honor system, and I paid what I truly owed.
Skeptics would think unscrupulous users would take advantage of the situation. True, there were some who did (though excessive document return would result in termination of the account), but most of us who used it, ponied up. It was affordable, and they were actually profitable. Back in my consulting days, I saved my firm a ton of money by using northernlight instead of L/N. Of course, not of that money got passed to me... but that's a story for another post
Didn't infoseek try this around 1995 or so?
The linked article says that Yahoo will charge for access to documents from a journal database - not for relevant search results. This makes sense, Google does not give access to all journal databases. High-quality research materials are difficult to find on the internet - they're usually on non-searchable parts of the web, if at all.
As somebody who is always driving to my local university library to do database searches, I find this exciting.
In can get lexis-nexis access at my local university, but it would be great if I could get it right from my home computer. The trouble is that lexis-nexis is completely unaffordable. How do I know this? When i go to their site to look at prices, they won't even list what it costs for a single user subscription. Instead, they want me to leave my contact info and have a salesperson call. Rough translation: they wanna charge me up the ***.
Now along comes Yahoo with seven thousand magazines, journals, and newspapers. And they'll let you download fifty articles for, what, five bucks a month? That's fantastic. If it saves me two trips a month to the University, it's more than worth it to me. Best of all, these articles come up with full references for my footnotes.
There are a few things I wish Yahoo had taken care of. There doesn't seem to be any listing of which periodicals are included in the database. It would be great to have such a listing broken down by subject, so that potential subscribers could check for their favorites.
Additionally, the splash page for this premium product is a joke. They need to tell you more about the service. It would be great if they offered more pricing tiers. If they are giving 50 articles a month for five bucks, it would be great if they could give 200 for ten bucks, or 500 for twenty bucks. 50 sounds a bit too few for somebody like me, and I wouldn't bat an eye to pay $20 bucks a month if I could do 95% of my book research at home.
Now that there's competition, expect the world of academic research services to become a commodity. In other words, if this Yahoo Premium product is a success, expect prices to decline across the board.
But the question is, would you pay for what you are describing?
Charging for a "good search" kind of implies a lower quality in the normal search, no?
I'd be very upset if I ran a search on Google (because I'll seldom search on Yahoo!), and it gave me no useful results, but told me that I could pay for actual results. I'd go use something else.
I understand that Yahoo's not making much money offering this service, but changing the original service that made it successuful is probably far from the right way to fix that.
As a sideline, I maintain an publicly available index of all Securities and Exchange filings, using a hosting account that costs me $14.95 per month and allows unlimited hits. That gives you a sense of how cheap it is to run a specialized search engine today.
A distributed peer-to-peer Google-type system is probably possible. Something like Gnutilla or Freenet, but with an architecture that distributes better and resists index spamming. As yet there's no need for it, but it's something to keep in mind.
I get so much use out of Yahoo, I'd be glad to give 'em a hundred bucks for the value that their service offers to me. Perhaps they should offer a voluntary contribution system. Of course, this would be much better if they were non-profit =)
You can already search the day's news articles using Daypop for free. Why pay Yahoo?
Ever noticed how every single successful Internet copmany has gone with the second approach? Google pushed everyone else out of the market by making a more useful service, while everyone else was making a less useful one to squeeze out the most dollars per hit.
not like yahoo can pull a Mr. T and do a 1-800- Collect comercial
hmmmm.. let me see, from what I understood, they are not selling the content... they are selling the "result" of your search.
:)
Something like:
"we found what you are looking for, but we will not tell you where it is until you pay for this search", hence the "pay per search" model.
If I am incorrect in my understanding and what you say is true, then yeah, totally! I can see what yahoo returns, take snippets and use Google to get to the source.
But I think my understanding is correct.
-farshad
...and remember in your brain boggle, wrong starts with a wubble-u.
Take a look at http://xxx.lanl.gov
Here you already see that the best physics and math papers are already available online for free. The search engine there is really good, too. The point is, that people who publish these documents want them to be read and right now, posting a paper to a preprint server gets it read the fastest (paper journals have 18 month lags), by the most people (no subscription fee and daily email notices of new postings). Everyone loves it. Professionals don't even go to libraries anymore. Yahoo's plan seems like a step in the backward direction.
On the other hand, if Yahoo were to mobilize dozens of top-notch journals (the places where the xxx preprints eventually get published) and their lawyers to shut down the free xxx site, they might have some success.
I know that I, for one, love the xxx service and would pay hundreds of dollars for it, I'm happy that it's free. If someone convinced me that the only way it would continue is as a pay-per-search site, I'd probably go along with it.
OK, it's not quite the same, but Ars Technica have had a premium membership service that gives you access to technical PDFs and other info not normally available. Apparently it's been quite successful, so there's some sort of a market for paid-content.
It'll ONLT be sucessefull if they actually let your search trough CIA or NASA documents.
...
r -s timulation.htm
...
What if you typed like "electrical vibrators" and you got some dildos insted of actual devices.
What is follow is an actuall yahoo search result:
"Types of Stimulation - #1 Adult Vibrators as Sex Toy Center
... disadvantages for each type, with the obvious being that the electrical vibrators
and clitoral stimulators have stronger vibrations then the battery powered
http://1-adultvibrators-as-sex-toys.com/vibrato
More Results From: 1-adultvibrators-as-sex-toys.com"
Searching trough like 15 documents I finally found what I was looking for
Auger Manufacturing Specialists
... products. Lift range adjustable from 1" to 7" to accommodate all common containers.
Electrical vibrators also available to settle free flowing products.
www.augermfg.com/products/product-line.html - 10k - Cached - Similar pages
Who would pay for anything they can get for free? Sure sure, they'll have a nicer search engine, blah blah. This stupid idea makes Napster look brilliant in comparison. Napster's competition is illegal, so they at least have one up on them. This pay-per-search is lame. Yahoo has little up on their competition. But, to the surprise of all sane people, there WILL be some people who will pay.
This is not a big deal, except it makes Yahoo's investment bankers happy, because they can claim there's big money coming. There ain't.
I believe that a service should be created to benefit users of Windows and Mac OS. Every click should be paid for by users, including clicks on advertisements. Windows and Mac OS, being the only two operating systems in existance, would count the number of clicks a user makes with the mouse, for any reason, and send this value directly to Yahoo. At the end of each month, users will receive a bill totalling $1.00 for each click, $5.00 access fee, and a $25.00 monthly service charge, for the priveledge of paying to click.
This would be beneficial to users because:
OH WELL.
Actually I'll give credit because your message was wrongly labled "insightful" when it should have been tagged as "funny".
He's being sarcastic about this, guys...don't take it so seriously. I just hate it when I have to explain a joke.
It's funny, laugh.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Maybe it's just me, but if people can already find the most relevant results on Google, what are the chances anyone's gonna use this service?
...Yahoo plans to charge consumers between $1 and $4 to retrieve files from a specialized database of some 25 million research documents culled from 7,100 publications, including academic periodicals.
Umm, no. Read the damn story. To quote:
Hence, most of this wouldn't be available in Google.
-Bill
Literacy on the Web.
Teach a Slashdotter to read today!
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
All of the information on my web site is copyrighted. No pay-per-search database is permitted to copy any portion of it for indexing purposes without a prior licensing arrangement.
Man, I hope yahoo stays afloat. Otherwise I'd have to force my brain to think of something other than ping yahoo.com to test connectivity.
Yahoo's game plan was to catalog the net. No way to make this complete, but that's what they were after. So people classified web pages and sites by the category that they were in. Like the difference between a libraries subject index and a kwic index. You can use them for the same thing, but the results are likely to be disappointing.
So Yahoo has a limited search capability, mainly for pages that they have already categorized. (This may have changed. I don't use it much as I tend to be looking for things too specialized for their categories to help much.) OTOH, Google has a quite limited categorization capability. Basically limited to which usenet group things were brought up in.
I really wish that Google allowed not tags. Or at least "if this word appears, subtract points from the page's score. If I'm after a landmark, I don't want to find a computer language, and vice versa. (Which is a problem that Yahoo doesn't have.)
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Since when do wild-ass guesses get moderated as "Informative?"
In a typical search on Yahoo!, Yahoo!'s directory is searched first. If this doesn't produce results (or the user requests it) Google is used. Google does these searches, not Yahoo!. The search performed is somewhat customized, and the results are processed by Yahoo! before they are returned to the user. But they use Google's database, not Yahoo!'s directory.So although you might say that "Yahoo! uses Google's technology," it's more accurate to say that Yahoo! uses Google, and when it does so lets Google perform the "technology."
yahoo's plan is to provide document search for documents you can't get for free/can't normally get online, so google will have no effect.
As for its attempt to get into Lexis's turf, it's got some catching up to do. Yahoo will offer 25 million docs? Lexis, in *1998*, offered 1.3 *billion* docs.
Cost-wise, though, Yahoo will be much, much, much cheaper. Lexis (and its competitor, Westlaw) are extremely expensive. Both have cheaper services, aimed at individuals and small law firms or other entities, but those services don't have nearly the same scope of search.
This is the end... my only friend the end... la la la la la la...
Is it just me, or does this scream 'pay for pr0n'.
BTW: First post! (I decided it should at least be semi-relevant
LOTR: Elijah Wood is a munchkin asshat. Yes, asshat. LOL.
Here's a page from the premium yahoo search that charges you $2 for an article on linuxgram.com: http://yhlib.northernlight.com/AbServ?p=linux&b=26 &cbrecid=PB20010821030001580
1 610239§ion=PH_171. Tell me again why I should pay nearly a penny per word for this? This is NOT premium content!
Now here's the URL of this article, which I got by searching for the title with linuxgram's search engine: http://www.linuxgram.com/article.pl?sid=01/06/13/
I'll take my guess at one more year.
This is a service that searches, and more importantly returns article from things such as academic journals, which are not generally free to the public. In other words, it's a clearing house for periodical literature of all forms, where relevant articles can be purchased for much less than the full issue of the journal in question. This is an extremely useful service for anyone in a scientific occupation who cannot afford to subscribe to all the journals relevant to the field, or who frequently must cull information from outside their field of immediate familiarity. This is an extremely useful service for a niche audience, and provided they don't spend too much getting it off the ground (always the catch in internet business endeavors) they should turn a respectable profit on it.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I would pay for a search engine that helped me find what I needed without having to wad throught dozens of sights.
Personlly I don't care what Yahoo does, but I do care about Google because, well they rock.
The others are all the same, they decided to make money by shoving a maze of electronic billboards in their users' faces.
Google seems to be moving in the right direction and I think they can continue to find sources of revenue without abusing and insulting their users.
They could extend their database with detailed consumer goods records. They could add a "product research mode" to the normal search interface.
References to specific items could show up as records containing a link to the manufacturer's webpage for THAT SPECIFIC PRODUCT, as well as the "add to cart" function at ANY COMPANY WHO PAYS A NOMINAL FEE for having their catalog included in the database. Think about how many mouseclicks it could save the average slashdot reader trying to research/buy an mp3 player for example.
And why not tie it right in with the UPC database so that if i want to buy more of (or maybe find out the antedote for) something i already have i can just enter (cuecat?) the code and go directly to a mfg page about the item and non-discriminatory links to where i can purchase it either online or locally?
User friendliness features could include personal vendor rating rules, etc. and could be done clientside or serverside.
A forward thinking company like Google which doesn't do banner ads, could even provide non web-based (few lines of perl maybe) access to the database without hurting the revenue stream because it would be the catalog publishers who would be footing the bill, not eyeball time.
Imagine a perl program which accepts a list of pc components for a custom system then automatically generates optimized web-based purchase orders for the stuff based on direct Google queries, personal vendor preferences, etc!
I think nobody is paying attention. It seems that CmdrTaco did not even read the original article with enough care. Or he does not understand English language very well or probably never went to university and therefore does not understand the concept of "academic article"
Question is, how many of the replies that don't seem to get that the original post was sarcastic, are actually sarcastic themselves?
It's turtles all the way down.
That's funny! This is a joke ..... isn't it??? Pay for a search ..... that's a funny one!!!