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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?"
I'm just wondering....
J.
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--
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
Here are your options:
1. Use Northern Light
2. Use Yahoo! and pay more than Northern Light for the same service.
Hmm
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,
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?
I do seem to remember a story a ways back about Yahoo switching to Google for it's search engine.
However, this stuff probably isn't stuff you could find in a normal Google search. I imagine this would have direct access to various newspaper and other archives. People who's job is research (not like scientific research, like think tanks and "research" companies...or when your boss says "I need to find out everything you know about by Tuesday") use engines like that where they need reliable quick access to the relevant information online as opposed to sifting through the piles of dross you get with a normal search. I believe Northern Light was built around something like this as it's base model originally, but I don't personally know as I never really used it.
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/
Why pay? Because people think that if it costs more, it's better. It's like in corporate meetings, the guy that gets paid the most generally has the most listened to opinion. It's why pay-per-view is still making just as much if not more money than video stores (yes I know pay-per-view generally gets movies first, but it's still at least double or triple rental price, and you only get to watch it once).
I am !amused.
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
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.
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!
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 think that the difference here is the size of the content... buying a Red Hat CD is useful to me, as I get the whole thing in my grubby little hands immediately. Yes, they packaged and delivered it, and that (to me) is the value.
Here's an interesting scenario :
1) People run the search through Yahoo's allegedly awesome search engine.
2) They see the search hits, and the (presumably) little snippet of text that interests you in purchase-downloading the content.
3) They open up a google window, and surgically search for that content snippet.
4) They find it themselves through google, for free.
I wonder if this went into their initial business plan...
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WWJD? JWRTFM!
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)
Isn't this just another Lexis-Nexis or JSTOR.
ÕÕ
Yahoo has made a serious mistake by including the word "Search" in the title of this service. The new service essentially sounds like Lexis-Nexis or InfoTrac -- a place where you can broadly search the full text of a broad number of publications at once. It's a database of information that they're selling, not the searching of it. It's not a search engine at all.
Many of the opinions here are being misled by the name, hence the debates about search engine technology. But this isn't a search of the Internet; it's a search of a finite database of publications, a database that's under the control of Yahoo! Any searchable corporate database would be similar, and making such an animal easy and effective isn't nearly as hard as making a good Internet search.
The ultimate question is whether there would be enough users. The price isn't half bad, if it's 50 documents for $4.95 and not 50 searches for $4.95. If you don't have easy access to InfoTrac or Lexis-Nexis or other such sources, that's a great deal; it's certainly a hell of a lot cheaper than buying your own Lexis-Nexis account.
But Yahoo is making a major marketing mistake by calling it "premium search." People who see that phrase make the immediate assumption that they'll be charged to use a search engine. Nobody would pay for that. But if they can deliver quality proprietary information at a cost that makes it more convenient than a trip to any library, they should change the name. Because they would then have a winner.
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.
According to this article [www.businessweek.com], Google's revenue for 2001 was around $50M, it has been cash-flow positive since Q1 of 2001, and it became profitable at the end of Q3 2001.