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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?"
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
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.