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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?"
Where on Yahoo is their pay-per-search? I can't find it. I will pay for this information.
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
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
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!
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?
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 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.
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
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
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.
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........
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
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.
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!
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.
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
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
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
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..."
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 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.
... 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
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();)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.
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.