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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?
3 years ago this would have generated approximately 6 billion dollars in venture capital already. Unfortunately for Yahoo!, it's not 3 years ago.
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!
I'm wondering if those publications are freely available from the internet? I think paying a couple of bucks and in return having 7'100 publications ready for searching/reading would be a great thing. If only they published a list of which publications they are going to make available ...
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
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
sPh
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...
If Yahoo pushes this hard to all their search users, then their volume will likely be a lot higher.
Imagine every Yahoo search resulting in a few hits to premium documents first, and then the normal search results. If you choose to click on the links for the premium documents, you go to a page with the abstract, the price, and information about the service (sort of what Northern Light does now). This is an incredible marketing channel if you happen to have the traffic volume Yahoo has.
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
Of course it will be ad free. Let's look at television and movies. When you watch regular, broadcast television the only way the broadcasters can recoup the cost is by running ads, much like Yahoo! does. But along comes cable TV and now we're paying to watch television. We all know there aren't any ads on cable TV, if there were people would complain loudly about paying twice and either the ads would cease or people would cancel their cable.
Similarly we are charged admission to go to the movies. Imagine if we had to sit through ads for snacks from the lobbies or upcomming movies, let alone dotcom and Mountain Dew ads, after plunking down $8.00 for a ticket to see the movie! What sane man wouldn't demand a refund from the manager and say "Good day" to that theater?
So of course Yahoo! will recognize that their subscription fees pay for the service and remove the ads. I shudder to think what kind of company would put profits ahead of their customers' experience.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
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.
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?
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!
Same for going to the movies. Here a movie ticket is about 7Euro, and before the movie we get ads ranging from local companies to movie previews.
I think both cases should be more considered like the magazine type of ads: they show the ads to reduce the costs and to allow the movie ticket or cable subscription at lower rates.
If yahoo takes this smart, they could offer different "levels" of subscription. One with ads, one without ads but at higher costs.