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Yahoo! Launches Pay-Per-Search

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the second-rate-search-costs-more dept.

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?"

3 of 338 comments (clear)

  1. If you can get it, you can get it for free. by 2Flower · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  2. Yahoo Pay-per-Search != Commercial Google by mirko · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  3. Secret Google by fm6 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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?
    Good point. But note that Yahoo is really selling content, not search services. The sad fact is that Yahoo has never been a good search site. Like many dotcoms, they put too much emphasis on branding and marketing, and not enough on technology. Now they're scrambling to do the boring stuff they should have started out with -- and also scrambling to find ways to pay for it.

    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!