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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.
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/
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.
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.
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!
As to the heroin-like aspect of L/N, I agree: they pulled the same deal at the business school where I took my MBA. It was funny to walk past the law students lined up 50 deep for the (at that time propriatary) terminal and into the B-school library where there was never a line!
sPh
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.
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.
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();)