Yahoo To Charge For Search Listings

ibi writes "Yahoo will start taking payments to "tilt the playing field" for companies that want their listings given more prominence by Yahoo's search engine. In an NY Times article, one search consulting firm [bias warning] claims that the extra material that paid listings get to submit will muck up the search results. Yahoo combined the announcement of the paid listings with an unrelated announcement of a new partnership with a few non-profits. ("Don't look over there - what about this nice shiny thing here.")"

Comments

Paid placement?

[ObviousGuy]

Google does that as well. Most search engines do that. What right of mine is being violated?

Re:Paid placement?

[Kilka]

But google does not place the results in the main results page, they are shown in a related "advertisements" box instead. The results of your query are the results of their algorithms only.

-Kilka

Re:Paid placement?

[FlipmodePlaya]

I'm with you. I think a few too many topics go in YRO.

I really don't mind them doing that. Using AltaVista, paid results are listed with a little divider between the rest of the results. That allows me to easily skip over the paid results without giving them undue notice. It's a good system that keeps my favorite search engine alive without annoying me.

Re:Paid placement?

[Tar-Palantir]

Google *does not* take money for higher placement. That's (partially) why they are revered here on Slashdot. Google's ads are separate, off to the side, and clearly marked.

Re:Paid placement?

[geoffspear]

The article summary is misleading. What they're doing is accepting payment to guarantee that your site gets spidered more often (or, technically, at all, but unless their web crawling technology is completely useless any site that would want to be crawled probably will be; they're trying to compete with Google which they can't do with fewer sites indexed). This is separate from their also offered service of paid advertising links like google's (which are set apart from the actual results and marked as ads). They also claim, contrary to what the summary seems to imply, that payment will not affect the order in which search results are displayed; the only benefit they're claiming for their paying customers is more frequent spidering.

Re:Paid placement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and it will always be this way ...

... up until the quarter after they IPO.

Re:Paid placement?

[X]

Google *does not* take money for higher placements. That's (partially why they are revered here on Slashdot. Google's ads are separate, off to the side, and clearly marked.

Congratulations, you have failed to read the article. Yahoo isn't taking money for higher placements either. Their ads are separate, at the top of the page, and clearly marked.

What Yahoo is taking money for is spidering a site more often. That's it. End of story.

Re:Paid placement?

[slugo3]

Using AltaVista, paid results are listed with a little divider between the rest of the results

google also does this. a search for "digital camera" comes up with two sponsored links right at the top of the page for pricegrabber and one for cnet shopping, clearly marked as advertisements. I see no problem with and have actually found the links to be useful sometimes.

Re:Paid placement?

[C10H14N2]

The posting is also misleading. "Your rights online?" WTF? You have a RIGHT to equitable search engine placement?

Where the hell is that written?

Re:Paid placement?

[saden1]

Yes, and it will always be this way ...

... up until the quarter after they IPO.

And that is when people start looking towards better search engines that give them more relevant results. Yahoo is setting itself up to fail IMO if it is true that they want to tangle paid results with actually results. I mean how are they going to compete with google whilst doing that? Their objective right now is to supplant google and I don't see how they can do that with this scheme.

Re:Paid placement?

[Erratio]

I think if they're placed at the top and seperated it may be a good addition. Often times the things that are searched for on search engines are products and services (etc.) which are provided by the types of companies that would pay for the placement, and as long as the prices are reasonable and the relevance of results monitored, then the paid results could be more targetted than a lot of the half relevant, half random pages than often show up. As long as they can be distinguished and bypassed easily, and as long as it doesn't turn into an auction for placement or anything. It may not be something that I, or most other people on /. would normally like, but it's a pragmatic solution.

Re:Paid placement?

[Prof.Phreak]

The results of your query are the results of their algorithms only.

I'm guessing it's the same with Yahoo, except $$$ is part of the algorithm too.

Re:Paid placement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, someone who's actually read the articles before commenting.

Re:Paid placement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's ads are separate, off to the side, and clearly marked.

Oh, are they ?

linky

Re:Paid placement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of equitable search engine placement.

Re:Paid placement?

[ajs318]

Yes, you have a right to equitable search engine placement: it's part of equal treatment, which I think most people would agree is a pretty fundamental human right.

Money paid for the purpose of securing an earlier listing in a search comes under the heading of "bakhsheesh".

Re:Paid placement?

[Stone Pony]

They aren't offering prime position in search results directly in exchange for money. What the article says is that:

"Yahoo will update its index of paying clients every two days, while it may update its listing of other sites once a month"

which is just a more regular spidering;

"Yahoo will give paying clients detailed reports on when its users click on their sites "

which they would probably have to do anyway as part of the billing structure (which includes a click-through element); and

"(Yahoo) will help those sites improve their listings."

which sounds like a search engine optimisation service to me.

The third point seems the most interesting. After all, most SEO companies have to make assumptions about the algorithms employed by the various search engines. Yahoo's paid customers will know that they're dealing with people who know the algorithm and, perhaps even more significantly, know in advance when it's going to be changed and in what ways. I could see that being a big benefit, but it's slightly different to just buying an enhanced position in search results.

Re:Paid placement?

[nysus]

Their objective right now is to supplant google...

Not really. Yahoo may lose 10% of the tech saavy audience in the short-term and 50% of the audience of the long-term as their reputation erodes (remember AltaVista?), but it's worth it to them if they can make a $100 million per year.

I don't think Google will be much different if they go public. Executives, board members, and majority stakeholders will always be tempted to make a quick killing for themselves. The pressure to run the gold ship aground and run off with the loot will always be there. And they would be in a position to make much more than $100 million.

Remember Pabst Blue Ribbon beer? That brand didn't die because the beer sucked. The brand died because executives pulled the plug on all advertising for the product. And all that money they saved on advertising became instant profit. Sure, beer sales plummeted after a few years, but the short-term rewards was all that mattered to the owners. And actually Pabst is still being sold and still makes a profit.

But back to Yahoo, it's also importnat to remember that it isn't just a search engine. They offer other services that will draw eyeballs to their site. That in turn, will feed the use of their search engine. Yahoo is relying on this factor to sustain the popularity of its web search feature.

Re:Paid placement?

[arkanes]

When you, or a paid third party, adjust your site or linkfarm or whatever in an attempt to raise your search rating, then you (or that third party) are gaming the system. A search engine that cares about accurate results will penalize you for such behavior (as Google does). On the other hand, when the owners and creators of the system will help you raise your rating, this is essentially paying for placement. Nobody will pay them without a guarantee that it will result in better placement (you'd be stupid to do so), and if it's purely in the arrangment of the site, then it'll me mimiced by everyone else within weeks. Therefore, the only way this service can be of any use is if being a paying customer directly affects your ranking, which is paying for placement. It's not interesting, all sorts of search engines did that, and Google NOT doing that is one of the reasons people use it.

Re:Paid placement?

[Stone Pony]

Not necessarily. Firstly, the greater frequency of spidering has a significant value in itself, at least to some people: shopping sites wanting to get a special offer indexed more quickly, that sort of thing.

Secondly, Google doesn't penalise sites solely for employing seo companies. The first paragraph of Google's page on seos makes that clear. Indeed, it would be impossible for them to do so.

I suppose that what would really matter here is the exact nature of of the services which Yahoo was providing. This isn't stated in the article, beyond the observation that "although sites would be able to pay to be in the index, its computer system would still pick the most relevant site for each search, without regard to payment status". Everybody accepts that a search engine which compromises the validity of its results is storing up trouble for itself. That said, I don't see anything wrong with optimisation which, for instance, sharpens the focus of a site in such a way that it both helps to bring it to the fore when it's relevant and filters it out of search results when it isn't.

Re:Paid placement?

[C10H14N2]

...sort of like when you pay the postal service a couple extra bucks to speed up delivery or the newspaper company to give you a more prominent placement on the page? Perhaps it's more akin to a telephone book where you have the option of taking the free record or paying up for something more prominent.

Oh, that's all SO wrong and unheard of. One begins to wonder if certain voices ever occupied this earth prior to the internet. Sheesh. The entire economy is based on the principle of bakhsheesh and France is certainly no exception--paying more to sit down for an espresso than to stand. Talk about freaking bakhsheesh, man...

Re:Paid placement?

[Stone Pony]

Define "equitable". Search engines results aren't fundemental truths, they're the output of complicated calculations devised and presented by private companies.

"Equitable", in that context, could only mean "processed by the same algorithm as every other web page in the index". Even then, the algorithm might include some provision boosting pages belonging to paying clients, or penalising pages with the letter "J" in the header, or some other randomly-determined condition.

In a rare moment of insight, the Slashdot editors have identified the key issue in the story summary, right where it says: from the full-disclosure-is-the-important-thing dept."

Re:Paid placement?

[Johnny5000]

"What right of mine is being violated?"

Rights don't have to be violated for something to suck.

Re:Paid placement?

[mdwh2]

I think the issue comes down to whether there is some implication of "popularity" or "relevance" based on the position in the list returned. If you want analogies, would it be okay if an exam board awarded grades, but gave a preferential marking style (I realise that Yahoo aren't directly adjusting positions, though more frequent spidering would indirectly give improved results) to people who paid them money?

And yes, I wouldn't argue that fundamental rights are at stake here, but you could say that of a lot of stories in YRO. It seems to be more of a "Things you might want to know about things online, that may affect you adversely" category, but I guess that name isn't quite so snappy;)

Re:Paid placement?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was a young'n, Pabst and Hamms were big. I miss the commercials showing the antics of the Hamms bear.

Re:Paid placement?

[Dun Malg]

The results of your query are the results of their algorithms only.

I'm guessing it's the same with Yahoo, except $$$ is part of the algorithm too.

If money is part of the algorithm at Yahoo, then it's specifically not the same.

Re:Paid placement?

[SatanicPuppy]

I think the competition among search engines leads inevitably to the death of engines that don't work very well.

I've always found yahoo to be rather limited, and I can't see how artifically skewing their search results is going to make them in any way better, or more reliable. Seems like you'd just be MORE likely to get a result that isn't what you want, as a half dozen companies get foisted off on you whenever you enter a certain keyword.

Re:Paid placement?

[Dun Malg]

What Yahoo is taking money for is spidering a site more often. That's it. End of story.

Not end of story. If you'd bothered to read to the end of the sentence in the article you would have noticed the following:

Yahoo will update its index of paying clients every two days, while it may update its listing of other sites once a month. And Yahoo will give paying clients detailed reports on when its users click on their sites and will help those sites improve their listings.

So, Yahoo is going to help paying advertisers "optimize" their sites for better rankings (i.e. tell them how to skew results in their favor by giving the spider what it wants). This is, to me, the biggest part of the service. The re-spidering seems like a secondary bonus added to make the tweaking optimization easier.

Re:Paid placement?

[Phlare]

Congratulations, you have failed to read the article.

Umm...Well, whether or not the grandparent poster read the article, I can't say for certain. However, it would appear *you* didn't read the article very carefully:

[From the NYT article, emphasis added...]

The paying sites will be intermingled with others in Yahoo's main search results listings, which are separate from the advertising called "sponsor results" on top of and to the side of Yahoo's search results.

Re:Paid placement?

[Shakrai]

... up until the quarter after they IPO.

Could you put the tinfoil hat away please? It's already been established over and over again that the Google team is going to retain a huge majority ownership. What was the initial IPO plan? A whole 15% of the company IIRC.

Even if they IPO'ed 51% of the company there's no guarantee they would start doing this (though I admit it would be more likely). Any shareholder worth his salt is going to recognize the unique features that turned Google into what it is -- why mess with success?

+1 interesting? Pa-lease.

Re:Paid placement?

[bigpat]

" Define "equitable". Search engines results aren't fundemental truths, they're the output of complicated calculations devised and presented by private companies."

I imagine many a conversation with marketing and sales at lycos/altavista/all the others started this way back in 1998.

The result was a mass exodus to google when all the others became exclusive directory services rather than search engines. A search engine is less than useless when it becomes an advertising engine.

Re:Paid placement?

[C10H14N2]

Sure, but this has been going on for years. You're more than welcome to submit your site again and again for spidering for free, within a reasonable time period. Considering the size of the internet, it is perfectly reasonable to say, "hey, if your content is so dynamic and so changing and so important that once a month isn't enough, you can pay for the service." Since processor time and bandwidth aren't free, it makes perfect sense that those who want more frequent spidering should kick back a few bucks to cover the costs directly associated with the benefit they derive. If you don't agree, you can use DMOZ, which will take weeks to months to return results. That's what free gets you and for most purposes, that's fine. So what if CNN gets spidered ever hour and your homepage gets hit every other month? Will the world be that much for the worse?

Re:Paid placement?

[X]

So, Yahoo is going to help paying advertisers "optimize" their sites for better rankings (i.e. tell them how to skew the results in their favor by giving the spider what it wants).

I suggest you look at Yahoo's service. All it does is give a site the same kind of reports they could get from an SEO consultant or do by themselves if they know how to get the job done. There is no "our engine would rank you better if you did foo to your site" kind of hints.

Re:Paid placement?

[X]

Umm...Well, whether or not the grandparent poster read the article, I can't say for certain. However, it would appear *you* didn't read the article very carefully:

Man, this is getting funny. You aren't even reading the relevant posts, let alone the article. Let me quote it for you, with the salient parts emphasized in bold as you did. I replied to this comment:

Google *does not* take money for higher placement.

My response was:

Yahoo isn't taking money for higher placements either.

Your retort was that I clearly had not read the article carefully because it clearly shows that the results are..... mixed in with the main search results listings?

To clarify in case their is confusion: there is a huge difference between intermingling the results using the same relevance ranking that you normally use and bumping a listing up in the rankings. Indeed, this was highlighted in the article.

Re:Paid placement?

[Shakrai]

I don't think Google will be much different if they go public. Executives, board members, and majority stakeholders will always be tempted to make a quick killing for themselves. The pressure to run the gold ship aground and run off with the loot will always be there. And they would be in a position to make much more than $100 million.

Please explain to me how this is going to happen when the original Google team is going to retain majority (a huge majority) ownership? IIRC the IPO was only going to be for 15% Why don't ya put the tinfoil hat away?

I don't get it.

[Trejkaz]

Isn't searching supposed to be getting the things which match? Why don't Yahoo just index more pages, and index that content better? Or is it just that they feel inadequate compared to Google?

Re:I don't get it.

[LostCluster]

"Yahoo" in the proper meaning of the term, never indexed. The original Yahoo was a directory rather than a search engine.

Yahoo has been charging for-profit ventures for a few years to be added to their directory. So, really, this is just the addition of a new feature in their "pay us to stand out" set. It's clearly further tarnishing Yahoo's reputation as a searcher... but Yahoo has never been anybody's primary search engine for years. Even Yahoo conceeded early on that some searches they just couldn't answer, which is why they've always had a partner like AltaVista, Inktomi, or Google to field failed queries.

Even Google conceeds that the way for a searcher to make money is to serve up targeted ads. The old GoTo.com who turned into Overture knew that in the late-90s too. But, the key is, Google has very solid lines between the content and the ads. However, some other search sites that use Google results and Google ads have allowed the line to become blured. Now, Yahoo's more or less offering a presentation format where the line will be absolutely invisible...

Be interesting to see if this works or backfires...

Re:I don't get it.

[BrokenHalo]

Isn't searching supposed to be getting the things which match?

Yup. That's why the rest of the world just uses Google. Last time I used Yahoo (long ago) it was a frustrating experience, which didn't inspire me to persevere.

Re:I don't get it.

[asteinberg]

Everyone's talking about how Google clearly separates its ads from its search results, and yes, that is nice, but I think Google has something else going for its advertising service that nobody seems to be noticing.

Google puts a lot of emphasis into making sure its ads are *good* results. More important than just indexing the advertised pages and doing the usual IR analysis on the content of the page, it also takes into account the click-through rate of the given ad. An ad with a higher click-through rate is probably more relevant since more users are clicking on it. Displaying ads which have historically high click-through rates benefits everyone involved - Google benefits by being more likely to get the money for the click-through, the user benefits by seeing more relevant ads, and the advertisers benefit by having their ad shown in relevant situations where people actually want to see it (hmm, I guess this last point is a bit weaker, but the benefit to the advertisers is not really important - they wouldn't be advertising if they saw no benefit).

One final point is that it's tempting to think this type of "user-moderation" system would work well for normal search results as well (and I suspect there's room to grow in this area), the reason it works especially well for ads is that there's less incentive for the advertiser to try to cheat the system - if they clicked their own links a lot, they might raise their ad's rank but also have to pay for all of those useless clicks.

Re:I don't get it.

[obeythefist]

It's the invisible line that causes all the problems, too!

Google provides great search results. They get money from ads, but maybe not as much as they might get from making the advertising line an invisible one.

Yahoo sees this, and they know they can make fantastic revenue by selling better reaching ads to customers.

The problem is what happens in the long term. Yahoo is trying to make a quick buck for the shareholders. But evil corporations, much like spammers really, will advertise so hard, they don't care what you're looking for in a search engine, so long as their site is first on your search results and their spam is at the top of your inbox, that's great for them.

But in the long term, the searchers aren't dumb. Google doesn't serve up walmart.com for every single search entry you enter, it gives them what they want - good results. Yahoo will be surfing up herbalviagra.com after every search result. Which engine will you use?

Re:I don't get it.

[Compuser]

The benefit to advertiser is clear: Google is the
ONLY place on the net where I click on ad links.
I am not alone...

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because some sites just aren't designed to be crawled. Say you have a catalog of 1000 items, which can be viewed through some db magic in 1000 * 1000 ways. Ideally, you want just 1000 pages to be crawled and refreshed. In many cases, this is only possible through some kind of agreement with the search engine, to submit a list of pages to be indexed along with their update frequency (free submit is a NOP).

Without this, the crawler would have to download and refresh all those 1M pages, and both the searcher and the webmaster would suffer.

BTW: AllTheWeb, Altavista and Inktomi all had this (which is paid inclusion, *not* paid placement). It's only natural that Yahoo would continue, as it has swallowed all those.

Re:I don't get it.

[stephanruby]

Yahoo will be surfing up herbalviagra.com after every search result.

Your point is well taken, but you're blowing things out of proportion. If the keyword is "car" or "minivan", the highest bidders for those keywords are not going to be viagra related -- they're going to be "car" or "minivan" related.

If anything, this trend will force the public to look at for-profit web sites when all they wanted is non-profit unbiased information. There is a reason many of us have turned off our TV and gone to the internet, it's because the commercial signal-to-noise ratio is much better.

Right now, Yahoo is selling off the only asset it has, its reputation. It doesn't bode well for their future. May be their CEO is leaving soon and he wanted to prop up his options one last time.

Re:I don't get it.

[the pickle]

Google doesn't serve up walmart.com for every single search entry you enter

Oh, you mean like MSN? "Black people on eBay," anyone?

p

Re:I don't get it.

[zCyl]

The benefit to advertiser is clear: Google is the
ONLY place on the net where I click on ad links.
I am not alone...

Same here. I don't click on ads that annoy me by getting in my way, because I just expect the site I reach to do the same. But Google ads avoid this, and it often feels more like there might be useful related content on the other side (and sometimes there is).

Re:I don't get it.

[afidel]

SO true, Google and Penny arcade are the only places I click ad links. And for good reason. Both use targeted relevant ads that are likely to lead to something I might actually be interested in.

Re:I don't get it.

[simong_oz]

That's why the rest of the world just uses Google.

Yep, and have done for a long time. BUT, recently almost everything I search for requires wading through 4+ pages of commercial sites or indexing sites or sites that just collect links or sites that redirect you to amazon. Google is becoming frustrating because all I seem to get are commercial links. Even with a stream of excluded terms, eg. buy, price, sale, etc added it doesn't seem to be helping the situation.

I like google's simple, quick, to-the-point interface but frankly the search results lately need improving.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google puts a lot of emphasis into making sure its ads are *good* results.

I don't think people who haven't advertised with Google realise this, but Google actually require (and enforce) a minimum click-through rate. That is to say, if you put up an advert, and not enough people click on it, it's taken off. It's clear to see how this affects the quality of the adverts that people see - if people don't find a particular advert useful, it's got rid of.

Re:I don't get it.

[qtp]

Google provides great search results. They get money from ads, but maybe not as much as they might get from making the advertising line an invisible one.

Somehow I think that google probably makes as much or more from their advertising, as I and many other users do not mind clicking on an advertisement that is both apropriate to what I'm searching for and clearly marked as an ad. I don't know if their rates are higher or lower per showing, but even if they are lower, I would be surprised if Google Ads were not the most successful advertising on the net.

Re:I don't get it.

[zerocool^]

Google puts a lot of emphasis into making sure its ads are *good* results.

What are you talking about?!?

I've been using google for about 4 + change years now, and I can remember a time when it used to blow away the competition on link accuracy. Unfortunately that time is no more. People have become experts in the art of google page rank spamming, and anymore, any time you look for *anything* on google, you get more on people selling it to you than how to do it. There are so many link farm pages out there now, it's just insane. I can't count the times I've searched for something only to come up with a page that has a link on it for what I was looking for, along with 3000 other links for the same thing, phrased a little differently.

I'm honestly looking for a new search engine. It's just that, even with all the commercial spamming on google, it's still the best thing out there.

But, don't mistake it - it's not as good as it used to be.

~Will

Re:I don't get it.

[infochuck]

If you don't get it, you are obviously daft. It's simple. I'll outline Yahoo's business plan from day one to make iteasy to follow along at home:

1. Make a decent search engine
2. Get popular, then start accepting payments for better placement
3. Lose a bunch of surfers almost overnight to a newer, better search engine that DOESN'T let $$$ skew it's results
4. Realize the error of your ways, stop taking paid placements, and - eventually - license the other company's search tech, since it is obviously superior.
5. Once a few people start using your engine/portal again (because the search doesn't suck anymore), GO BACK TO PAID PLACEMENT, and DITCH the better engine (suckers!)
6. ???
7. Profit!!!
8. Repeat, and rinse

Re:I don't get it.

[dthree]

I agree completely. I use it only to find things that I can specify very exactingly, like a motherboard model number with a sound card model number with an error number. I disagree with pageranks assumption that more pages that link to a page make that page more valid.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what really irked me about ads from most search engines. Back when I regularly searched on sites other than Google, it blew me away that regardless of what I was searching for, I got an ad for those freaking X-10 cameras.

A friend of mine works in marketing. He said the holy grail of marketing is the ability to determine who is potentially interested in your product, and to get your ad to those people at a time when they're receptive. Search engeins have access to this data, and most of them quander it. Google does an excellent job, and most of the ads I've ever clicked through online have been delivered by Google. It's so bloody simple:

"Hey, I'm looking for information on widgets."
"Ok, here are sites on widgets. Oh and this guy sells widgets for $5 a dozen."
"Wow! Let's see if he has them in lavander!" [click]

These days I notice I've developed a filter. With Google I always know where the ads will be on the page, so I'm not even conscious of their presence unless I'm in a purchasing mood. This is why you shold awlays make the distinction between ads and content.

Re:I don't get it.

[asteinberg]

Google puts a lot of emphasis into making sure its ads are *good* results.

What are you talking about?!?

Umm, did you actually READ my post before deciding to reply with yet another generic rant about Google getting worse? My point has nothing to do with the accuracy of non-advertising search results.

I was simply pointing out that while many (all?) other sites will accept any advertiser willing to pay the right price, Google will choose which ad to display not based on the amount the advertiser pays but based on the relevance of the ad to the search. This relevance is evaluated based on user click-through rates of the ad - if the rates aren't high enough, the ad will not be displayed. The ads are in some sense "user-moderated", a la Slashdot. As a result of this, sometimes the ads even wind up better than the normal search results!

Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[chrisopherpace]

Google by far beat Yahoo the first time, because Google has a simple interface, with very few misleading pages (except for the bombs, which are at most the first few sites). Yahoo, on the other hand, has always had inferior searches. This will only make Yahoo's searches worse, resulting in more people flocking to google. Just my 2 cents.

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[RLiegh]

Forget Yahoo, it's 1996 technology. I'm waiting for the search engine/portal which will come up to replace google.

I'll be interested to if it topples google due to being better, or due to google chasing after the IPO money a little too hard...

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[st0rmshadow]

Google by far beat Yahoo the first time, because Google has a simple interface,

While I agree with everything you said, I disagree with this:

For people just interesting in searching with Yahoo! (for whatever odd-ass reason they have...), can use http://search.yahoo.com/

The fact of the matter is, most people just don't use Yahoo! for searching, they use it for whatever other banal crap they use Yahoo! for, the search feature just makes it so they don't have to move their mouse ALL THE WAY up to the address bar and type in google.com

As for a google replacement, AllTheWeb was a nice suppliment, but never really a replacement...Teoma.com is looking better every time I use it, and I think has been mentioned here before.

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[ron_ivi]

Remember way back when Yahoo had a simple interface with only two images on the very-quickly loading home page.

That was back when they cared about user experience and their stock was at an all time high.

PS: Note that the Y2000 problem was real!!! Within one week of Jan 1 Y2000 both Yahoo and Microsoft were at their all-time high; and have never recovered since.

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google by far beat Yahoo the first time, because Google has a simple interface, with very few misleading pages (except for the bombs, which are at most the first few sites).

I think you meant the first few pages, at least if you're searching for anything that could remotely be confused with an item people think they could sell you.

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[petabyte]

Since you've gone and played with the wayback machine I thought I would to. Its interesting that google has gone the other way and their page today is simplier than it was back then.
Good to know the linux search was still there "back in the day".

God, I feel old now ...

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[chrisopherpace]

I'm aware of the search.yahoo issue, but lets think of this another way:
google.com
search.yahoo.com


6 characters longer. Makes a minor difference. Google did not win by simple site layout alone, but this was a part of Google winning.

Think of it this way: how is Joe Schmoe going to know to use search.yahoo.com? Even if he did, would he remember it? Probably not. Just some food for thought I guess.

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[innocent_white_lamb]

google has gone the other way and their page today is simplier than it was back then.

A nice side-effect (for them) is that any change that makes the length of the average page served even a byte or two slightly smaller would add up to humungous megabytes of bandwidth every hour.

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, I remember. When they changed formats is when I stopped using it.

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too. Wonder why Yahoo didn't learn.

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[Ironica]

Remember way back when Yahoo had a simple interface with only two images on the very-quickly loading home page.

Ahhh... nostalgia.

And what's more compelling to note about the old Yahoo! interface... there are *so many* sites that copied it, because it worked. Many of them still use the same format today (even though Yahoo! long abandoned it in favor of more AOL-style angry fruit salad).

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[afidel]

yahoo mail
maps.yahoo.com
hotjobs

About the only thing I don't use yahoo for is searching. Their search engine is basically worthless and this addition will only make it worse. Then again I had to type the whole URL for yahoo since it wasn't in my 90 day history, I never use the main page so I'm probably not a typical yahoo user =)

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still get a somewhat old page here:

http://204.71.200.75

My guess is that Yahoo! still has a old server somewhere that has the original still running...

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[Anonymous Coward]

!!!! Thanks !!!!!

I found my new home page!!!

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[dragongrrl]

Remember way back when Yahoo had a simple interface with only two images on the very-quickly loading home page.

Yahoo started as a directory and now has morphed into a Portal. The search has always been an "add-on" IMO. If I want to search, I use Google, PERIOD.

Specialized tools work best, no?

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[st0rmshadow]

What I was saying is that most Yahoo! has a light layout search feature. What I meant was that Yahoo!'s search engine is really only going to be used or useful for people who are already on Yahoo!, I mean, if your homepage is your custom my.yahoo.com page, are you going to go to google every time you want to search something? I'm aware that the average /.'er might (although that raises the question of what a /.'er is doing with my.yahoo as his homepage...), but Joe Schmoe or my Grandma doesn't care if Google might yeild better results, she wants to find her Apple Pie recipe using the search engine that she's already looking at.

ODP

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not perfect, but the Open Directory Project is a better Web directory. It powers the Google Directory as well.

Re:ODP

[Dun Malg]

It's not perfect, but the Open Directory Project is a better Web directory.

Not sure I'd consider it better. A single site can monopolize the results. For example, if you search for "xyzzy", 80% of the results returned are from the same site (xyzzynews.com) and the "hits" are finding the search term in the URL (e.g. http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.1f.html##grc). Google, on the other hand, doesn't count URL matches as a "hit", and doesn't spew fifty hits for the same site. It did require me to specify english, though, because apparently "xyzzy" is very popular among the Japanese. To me, a strong aspect of being "better" is the engine's ability to give me results where my search term shows up on the page, rather than just in the URL; and, failing that, I'd like it if one site couldn't show up more than once as a hit so I can skip it.

This sounds wrong, but...

[l810c]

I'm not entirely against the idea of paying for placement if it's specified. We need a middle ground between completely free and expensive sponsored links. This might help filter Search Engine Spam, which is fast becoming a huge hassle and detriment to successful searching.

Perhaps a fee of $5-$10/year and you become a 'Registered Site'. This may eliminate a lot of the junk link sites that seem to be operating on the same methods as spam.

Wrong or right, this may actually improve the perceived accuracy to many users. If not, people will just continue to migrate to Google.

Re:This sounds wrong, but...

[2674]

This will not work, the Junk placement guys a la Searchking will just hike their fees....

Re:This sounds wrong, but...

[l810c]

This will not work, the Junk placement guys a la Searchking will just hike their fees....

How about adding a fee of say .25 per Keyword? A normal site could have 10-40 Keywords costing them an additional $2.50-$10/Year. These sites that just seem to have a keyword for every damn thing you might think to search on would not be able to cover the costs.

Re:This sounds wrong, but...

[Suhas]

But Consider that on an average a business will not want to be placed on top for more than a few keywords. The Search spammers will then be able to spread out the cost of a few sites over a large number of businesses....

Re:This sounds wrong, but...

[martin-boundary]

That's silly. You're not offering any incentive to stop spamming keywords. What's to stop companies from both paying for a commercial listing and continuing to spam keywords to get listed in the other categories as well? Remember, companies think the more exposure the better. It's not more work, you just pay a search engine placement scammer a small fee.

Re:This sounds wrong, but...

[WhatsAProGingrass]

Shouldn't paying $29.95 a year be enough just for the domain name? If you had to pay $10 dollars a year, that would be just like paying $39.95 for the domain name? People would still do it.

Re:This sounds wrong, but...

[Wycliffe]

.25 per keyword per year. Yeah Right!!
You obviously aren't that familiar with the PPC (Pay Per Click) industry. Google and overture(yahoo) both charge a minimum of .10 per keyword per click with some keywords costing upwards of $7 PER CLICK. Search engine placement is big money with many companies spending in the 5 and 6 figures PER MONTH for placement. So unless google/overture lower their rates low enough to make it unprofitable for the search engine spammers (and likewise unprofitable for themselves), there will always be someone trying to sell placement cheaper than overture/google.

Re:This sounds wrong, but...

[TJmoney]

Perhaps a fee of $5-$10/year and you become a 'Registered Site'. This may eliminate a lot of the junk link sites that seem to be operating on the same methods as spam.

You think for $5-$10 a year spammers won't all have thier pages at the top? If yahoo tries to stop spammers from getting listed high, they will play the censorship card, or just offer to pay more for a higher listing, and how can Yahoo turn that down?

Re:This sounds wrong, but...

[l810c]

From my original post:

We need a middle ground between completely free and expensive sponsored links.

There would still be sponsored links, that would pay big bucks per click, etc.

So unless google/overture lower their rates low enough to make it unprofitable for the search engine spammers

Google wouldn't lower Any rates, they would add a new middle, registered rate. The purpose of this rate being to remove spam. If this registered rate charges by keyword, the spammers could not possibly keep up. They have some algorithm where they have possibly thousands of keywords on their pages that get spidered and they also link to other spam search pages. If each of these sites had to register these 1000's of keywords, it could not be profitable.

Re:This sounds wrong, but...

[Ironica]

Google wouldn't lower Any rates, they would add a new middle, registered rate. The purpose of this rate being to remove spam. If this registered rate charges by keyword, the spammers could not possibly keep up. They have some algorithm where they have possibly thousands of keywords on their pages that get spidered and they also link to other spam search pages. If each of these sites had to register these 1000's of keywords, it could not be profitable.

This sounds like it would remove a lot of the usefulness of Google, because most of the sites that just happen to have the info I'm searching for would never bother registering those particular keywords (or any keywords at all).

I could see them offering two different services, such as having this registration system set up on Froogle. But the cool thing about Google is it finds me stuff that didn't know I was looking for it.

Re:This sounds wrong, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

"If this registered rate charges by keyword"..."they have possibly thousands of keywords on their pages"

Google and also yahoo already limit the number of words they search per page, it's about 1000.

Re:This sounds wrong, but...

[Wycliffe]

This would possibly work for sites that create thousands of low profit pages, but many of the spam pages are not neccessarily low profit. Many spammers are creating thousands of high profit pages. For example, if the spammer charge their customers .25/click for a top 10 listing and get 5000 clicks a month, $10/year or .25/keyword/year isn't going to slow them down much as they'll just target the high traffic keywords and ignore the rest (which they pretty much do already anyways).

Sorry to break it to anyone

[djupedal]

...but search engines went to hell about 8 years ago. Paid ranking didn't just arrive on the tarmac this afternoon at 2:38, runway 12, now did it...

Re:Sorry to break it to anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

No - it was at 2.45 on runway 17!

Re:Sorry to break it to anyone

[el-spectre]

Well, yeah... I'm sure they were much better 8 years ago when the only thing on the web was berkeley and IIT... Any more "Back in my day" stories, sir?

Re:Sorry to break it to anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

No... but I did...

Re:Sorry to break it to anyone

[djupedal]

wow...you are new to all this, aren't you? :)

Re:Sorry to break it to anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone point and laugh at el-spectre....!! hehehehahaha!!!

What an el-green-o rube joke el-spectre is!! hehehe!!!

Search Engine Spam

[lewko]

As long as the paid placements are delineated as such (e.g. Google's paid listings) they may not be such a bad thing.

At least it's more upfront and honest than spamming the search engines which seems to be the other option and is wholly destructive to the utility and relevance of a particular search engine.

Re:Search Engine Spam

[Tony-A]

As long as the paid placements are delineated as such (e.g. Google's paid listings) they may not be such a bad thing.

Methinks they are a good thing, so long as they do not influence the rankings in the main list.

As long as Google can survive and keep their integrity, I'm in no hurry to look for anything better.

Other things being more or less equal, I'll buy from an advertiser in Google.

more upfront and honest
In the long haul, that's always better to deal with.

You get all the worms and viruses because your computer is not upfront and honest with you. Think about it. That's why the malware doesn't stick to Linux.

Re:Search Engine Spam

[paulschroeder]

Delineated like the anti-snoring ad in your sig? :-)

Re:Search Engine Spam

[gnu-generation-one]

"As long as the paid placements are delineated as such (e.g. Google's paid listings) they may not be such a bad thing."

Ever seen about.com?

so many "clearly-delineated" sections you can hardly find anything. It's 4 sections of which 2 are sponsored links, one is a search of their website, and one is a web-search.

Of course, the banner adverts on the top and bottom of the page are also clearly-delineated, just in case you wanted some colour to brighten up the day. What's the word for someone with a love of horizontal lines?

Re:Search Engine Spam

[lewko]

What's the word for someone with a love of horizontal lines?

Bad dresser?

Re:Search Engine Spam

[lewko]

It's funny you should ask :-) Actually, the "--" is a throwback to Usenet signatures.

The link is my Father's website. He's a doctor and it's a genuine information resource about snoring (i.e. it's not selling miracle cures etc. like most snoring related websites.)

If you do a Google search for Snoring, snoring.com.au is one of the highest ranking sites given the quality of its information and how long the site has been around (5 years - forever in Internet time).

The Spammers have tried to benefit from the high Google ranking and a number of sites selling sleeping pills and miracle snoring cures (snake-oil!) have inferred an association with our site in their keywords to try and spoof Google. It's a little hard to explain, but it seemed to work briefly. Then Google got wise and changed the algorithm to penalise such spamming attempts.

When that happened though, our site was apparently penalised for it by the reverse association (i.e. to the spammers).

I guess that's why I'm acutely aware of search engine spammers and the depths some of them will go to.

Contradiction?

[NotAnotherReboot]

For its commercial Web site owners, Yahoo unveiled a new "paid-inclusion" program called Site Match, which allows commercial Web sites to pay to be indexed and included in regular search results.

and...

The company says the paid listings will not rank higher in its results than they otherwise would.

So...unless I'm not getting this, they're making it sound as though advertisers pay for...nothing. Which clearly isn't correct

Re:Contradiction?

[univgeek]

They pay for more frequent spidering of their webpages. This would certainly be a benefit to some commercial sites. Not sure that it is useful for a majority of sites.

Re:Contradiction?

[wronskyMan]

From the SiteMatch trademark application:

Providing electronic navigation services via the internet, namely, providing search engine services for obtaining data on a wide variety of topics; tracking and analyzing the performance of online advertising for others; providing information, creating indexes of information, indexes of web sites and indexes of other information sources in connection with the Internet; providing information from searchable indexes and databases of information, including text, electronic documents, databases, graphic and audio visual information, by means of the Internet; providing editorial review, marketing consultation, site performance analysis and reports regarding the performance of client web sites

It is possible that the payment ensures that the commercial sites are regularly crawled every x days for example, which would be of assistance to online merchants who want their latest deals to appear on searches, instead of their page from a week ago. The trademark app also indicates the possibility of companies being able to get usability/statistics reports generated by the crawler for their sites.

Re:Contradiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging from the first quote, you will have to pay just to be in the search engine's database.

Assuming your quote is correct (I am not about to sign up to NYT), the Slashdot blurb was misleading, like usual.

Re:Contradiction?

[mdfst13]

I do a lot of work with shopping cart sites...many of them would pay to move up the spidering after making changes (e.g. US$20 to spider today rather than next month). If that's all that this is (paying to get your site spidered earlier and/or more often), then it's a good thing. Free sites will still get spidered and rankings won't get affected (except in the short term, i.e. when they would otherwise not be listed because the content hasn't been spidered yet), but sites will have the ability to speed up the spidering process if they have time dependent info (or just don't want to wait two months to get spidered after making changes).

Interestingly enough, one of the main uses I could see for this would be for news organizations to pay to get their new news spidered on a regular basis (hourly?). The intriguing part of that is that those people would be competing with Yahoo (which offers news access as one of its services).

Of course, you can also get problems long term, as they switch from a net wide scan every three months to six months to a year... All to make their frequent spider program look better.

Re:Contradiction?

[LostCluster]

In addition to more frequent spidering is a first spidering for a page that might have otherwise never entered the index. For sites like Amazon.com that have a deep, deep, deep, database of pages, it's an advantage for them to be able to push their changes in rather than wait for the spider to stumble upon what changed.

Again, this is not a service for somebody who runs a small site, it's for the huge sites to attract traffic to their deeper pages.

Re:Contradiction?

[zurab]

I do a lot of work with shopping cart sites...many of them would pay to move up the spidering after making changes (e.g. US$20 to spider today rather than next month).

Hmm... I can see it now.

On-Demand Spidering.

Abstract: A method and a system where a search engine or a search service spiders a content of a website on demand, within a specified time period, by the user of the service or the website. The user may be (or may not be) required to compensate the search engine provider for this service.

Claim 1. All your spidering are belong to us!

Re:Contradiction?

[mefus]

one of the main uses I could see for this would be for news organizations

And useful to many other organizations, as well. Don't doubt it. Anybody that wants premium placement will try to be involved in the implementation of a search engine's algorithms. Or at least privy to their weaknesses. This feature (paid spidering) will be used to displace the information I want to find off the front page of the search engine. If it doesn't do that by default they'll figure out a way to ensure that it does (i.e., hack it).

And in the end, finding what I want on the first page will become arcane invocations and sophisticated wordplay.

Google's getting difficult to use because the junk peddlers are learning to hack it.

Maybe the next great search engine will be one that is hack resistant.

Re:Contradiction?

[Tony-A]

Google's getting difficult to use because the junk peddlers are learning to hack it.
Maybe the next great search engine will be one that is hack resistant.

The next great search engine is most likely Google, as they struggle to stay ahead of the junk peddlers.
You have much the same situation with Slashdot, as they struggle to stay ahead of meept and its successors.

Surprise!

[Herkum01]

Should anyone be? That seems the only way people can come up with to make money off of search engines. I am not saying it is a good way, or the right way, but damned if it has not been done before so lets do it again! Its gotta work this time!

Google did an excellent job with their advertising model, now if only someone attempt to copy that part instead of the search technology maybe we will be alright.

Depends on how they present them...

[Major Wedgie]

Google doesn't present the paid ratings as actual search results, do they? I believe they actually present them separately, clearly marking them as paid listings. If Yahoo wants to do this, I don't have a problem with it, as long as they don't pretend that these paid listings are there for the same reasons as a 'good hit' is. . .

Well gee

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the one certain way to convince the world that they're going to produce higher-quality search than Google, isn't it?

Please excuse me if I now take the view that the playing field in the upcoming search engine war has dropped to two players, Google and MS. Yahoo meanwhile, it appears, is going to simply continue to do its own little "portal" thing off in the corner and stay out of it.

Contradiction?

[venicebeach]

First, they say that this won't actually affect our search results:

Yahoo said that although sites would be able to pay to be in the index, its computer system would still pick the most relevant site for each search, without regard to payment status."What our users care about is the relevancy of results, not whether the source paid to participate," said Tim Cadogan, a vice president in Yahoo's search unit.

And then later on:

Mr. Cadogan said that the purpose of the program was simply to offer Yahoo users more relevant information.

Huh?

model

[mhlandrydotnet]

So Yahoo! has decided that a search engine where pages get ranked by advertising dollars as opposed to a search engine ranked by what the user wants (relevance to the search term) is a good idea? Nothing like finding what the customer wants and giving it to him/her.

Re:model

[iswm]

Nothing like finding what the customer wants and giving it to him/her.

Or lack thereof...

Bad move

[Hopelessness]

This is definitly going to skew the results towards the biggest companies (Not as if they intened otherwise, just stating this). If they wanted a search engine that was at least useful compared to Google, this was not the way to go. I don't just want to see the highest bidders in the results.

This is actually good

[prostoalex]

Well, there's always silver lining. Yahoo is currently adding a bunch of sources (including audio NPR feeds available via text search) that weren't available via general search engine before.

Among the organizations working with Yahoo! are National Public Radio, Northwestern University, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and the National Science Digital Library.

Before that they've added support for RSS feeds to both Yahoo Search and My Yahoo.

The paid directory program does not seem to be that big of a deal right now compared to where Yahoo's catalog was three or four years ago, when you had to be there to conduct any decent business. When was the last time you used Yahoo's catalog? It's good to see the top guys among search engines fight for that top spot, search engine business needs competition.

which customer do you mean?

[RLiegh]

the customer buying the placements?

Re:which customer do you mean?

[mefus]

the customer buying the placements?

That one? You think that one wants a search engine nobody thinks is useful?

Lack of innovation in search sector

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading the article - I can't help but be amazed at how little the search sector has changed in 5 years. Google came out with pagerank in 1999 (publically - it was running at stanford for much longer) - and now we're in 2004 - and the technology that runs 3 of the worlds top engine (msn, google and yahoo) is still the same thing - link weighting and keyword matching.

Where's the semantic analysis? Where's the intelligence in the software? How come we can block 99.997% of email spam - but not 5% of google spam.

And now the news is that yahoo is accepting payments for placement - which is entirely understandable, there's no better technology for ensuring that the top search results at least won't be to link-farms. They'll just be to the highest bidder.

Roll on the new search tech!

SharedID - Single Sign On for webapplications.

Re:Lack of innovation in search sector

[System.out.println()]

I'm still not sure what all this "google spam" I keep hearing about is. Google-bombs and (understandably) obscure searches excluded, I can *always* find what I typed into the search box and the "spam" remains off in its little boxes to the side.
Unless I've missed something... Have I been clicking on Google spam all this time while thinking it's a relevant result?

Re:Lack of innovation in search sector

[Anonymous Coward]

essentially, yes. Many of the sites I see at the top of the rankings are link farms. They'll go through and list keywords, with a link from page to page. Often, they're a redirect to another search engine. To know, check for a querystring / get (http://something.com?something+something).

Admittedly, they don't appear all the time, and they aren't the top result all of the time, but I didn't see _any_ like that two years ago. Google was impenetrable, but now they are a significant portion of the results.

Re:Lack of innovation in search sector

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's the semantic analysis? Where's the intelligence in the software? How come we can block 99.997% of email spam - but not 5% of google spam.

Because there are more than 32000 times as much e-mail spam.

Re:Lack of innovation in search sector

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have javascript enabled, you may be missing a redirect page that is stuffed with links to make it rank higher on the list of results. Often, of the first 4 or 5 highest ranked links, 2 or even 3 of them may end up redirecting you to the same site :(

Re:Lack of innovation in search sector

[solidox]

Where's the semantic analysis? Where's the intelligence in the software? How come we can block 99.997% of email spam - but not 5% of google spam.

well, the theory goes that google implemented Latent Semantic Indexing around the start of december with it's florida update.
the problem was that it arsed the search results and created many pages of irrelevent mung. very few people (webmasters) were happy with the update, nor were the searchers.
so a few weeks ago google removed it (or lessened it's importance) and things are starting to get back to normal.
intellegent software obviously dosn't nessicerely give better results.
(disclaimer: the above isn't proven fact as google hasn't said anything about it, but it seems to be the case based on the facts availible)

Re:Lack of innovation in search sector

[Moraelin]

The problem there is that AI today is Artifficial all right, but isn't anywhere near Intelligent.

E.g., what gets touted as great AI in games is still some hard-coded scripting and some equally hard-coded pathfinding algorithms. E.g., you know those great AI bots in Unreal Tournament? They're really just scripted. The enemies which investigate noises and kneel by corpses in NOLF2? Scripted. Etc.

And those are cases where tha AI really has an easy and well defined job. When you move to understanding written text, it's even more screwed up.

Noone has yet figured out how to really understand semantics. And:

- is that text a parody of another text, but drawing interesting parallels that might interest you nevertheless? (E.g., the "Emperor's New Code" or "Reactive Programming (RiP)" satires about XP on the Software Reality site. Right or wrong, as it may be, but there is some point about XP burried in there.)

- is it about a subset of your search? E.g., an article on "Pair Programming" might be very relevant to someone searching for "Extreme Programming". But the article text itself never says the words "Extreme" or "Programming". How does a search engine know that "Pair Programming" is one of the cornerstones of "Extreme Programming?" (And indeed the most controversial and debated one. So if you're pondering inflicting XP upon an unwilling team, you may want to read about it first.)

- is it a metaphor? E.g., phrases like "Name of the Rose" might be a metaphor or reference to some classic philosophical issue (and used as such in the title of an Umberto Ecco novel), and not actually relevant to your search about actual roses to plant in your garden.

- is it some subtlety or irony in there? Sometimes, in the right context, the same phrase can actually be used to mean the exact opposite or to imply that someone supporting it is nuts. A classic example is "Yeah, right", which actually isn't a wholehearted confirmation. But essentially any other phrase can be mangled to that end.

- is it an informed opinion? E.g., a Harvard professor of economics writing about some trade issue will probably be a lot more relevant to my search, than the ramblings of 12 year old on a blog. E.g., an US Army/Marine Corps/whatever officer's about the M-16 as used in the Gulf War, is probably a lot more relevant than the whine of some 12 year old Counter-Strike player about how it sucks in the game.

- is it even in the right context? See above. When searching, for example, for info on global warming, I'm definitely not interested in seeing 100 pages about some game or movie whose story happens in a post-global-warming world. I.e., I'm interested in stuff which is in the context "Real Life", not in the context "dramatic fiction" or "plot devices".

Etc, etc, etc.

That's all stuff which a machine simply doesn't know. Noone figured how to teach all that stuff to a machine, nor how to make it even understand it.

Now imagine this problem multiplied times 10, because you might have to search in other languages too.

Re:Lack of innovation in search sector

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on what you search for.

If you're searching for porn, especially if it's the least bit obscure, or other heavily advertised sites, you're likely to get the "link farms" and such which look like entries in someone else's search engine. When I suspect a link farm, I look at Google's cache, avoiding looking at the site directly.

Why hasn't Google caught on? For one, some of the sneaker pages display an entirely different site when they see the user-agent of Google's spider...

Nasty, huh? Yeah, I've mentioned that trick to their feedback before. I saw a broken script in their cache. I figure that others are probably able to write it correctly to ill effect...

Credibility

[Sparky77]

Paid-for search results lessen the credibility and trustworthiness of a search engine. I personally don't put any stock in results that I know might have been manipulated by the flow of cash. If I want to find information about laptops, I want this, not this. Notice that the google search returns links to relevant research sites, whereas overture just spams me with links to retailers. A good search engine helps you find information that's not easy to find on your own, and it's not exactly difficult to find someone who wants to sell you something.

Re:Credibility

[Anonymous Coward]

They both return sites selling laptops and laptop batteries....

Damn Overture To Hell! It's Poisoning Google!

Re:nothin could be finer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm interested in your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Never release bad news on a slow news day...

[LostCluster]

And of course, this all comes out on Super Tuesday, a day when newscasts will be filled with primary election results and therefore won't have time to mention a comparitively small-time business story. The 30-second mention this story might have gotten on mainstream stations drops to zero.

This is a classic case of releasing the bad news when as few people as possible looking.

In other news....

[222]

Google doesnt suck.

Re:In other news....

[Anonymous Coward]

you do.

Text of Article

[OverlordQ]

Yahoo to Charge for Guaranteeing a Spot on Its Index
By SAUL HANSELL

Published: March 2, 2004

ahoo said yesterday that it would start charging companies that want to ensure that their Web sites are included in its Web index from which research results are selected.

The practice, called "paid inclusion," has long been a part of many search engines including Microsoft's MSN search function and Ask Jeeves. But Google, which last year surged ahead of Yahoo to become the No. 1 site for searching on the Internet, disdains the practice as misleading.

Last month, Yahoo replaced Google, which had operated Yahoo's search engine, with its own technology to index billions of Web pages. Yahoo says it hopes to include every site on the Internet it can find in that index at no charge. But sites that pay for Yahoo's new program can guarantee that they are included in the index.

Advertisement

Yahoo will update its index of paying clients every two days, while it may update its listing of other sites once a month. And Yahoo will give paying clients detailed reports on when its users click on their sites and will help those sites improve their listings.

The paying sites will be intermingled with others in Yahoo's main search results listings, which are separate from the advertising called "sponsor results" on top of and to the side of Yahoo's search results.

Yahoo said that although sites would be able to pay to be in the index, its computer system would still pick the most relevant site for each search, without regard to payment status.

"What our users care about is the relevancy of results, not whether the source paid to participate," said Tim Cadogan, a vice president in Yahoo's search unit. He pointed out that many companies hire firms that specialize in tweaking Web pages so that they rise in search rankings.

Yet executives at several of those firms say that paying to be included in search indexes often does help paying sites jump ahead of nonpaying sites: paying sites are allowed to submit additional information, in a so-called data feed, which helps the search engine associate their pages with a given topic.

"Almost without fail, any time we submit a feed, stuff that was nowhere to be found on a search engine pops up to the top," said Gord Hotchkiss, president of Enquiro, a search consulting firm.

Sites will pay from $10 to $49 for each Web page indexed and from 15 cents to $1 each time a Yahoo user clicks on a link to their sites.

Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, estimates that this paid-inclusion program will produce $100 million a year in revenue for Yahoo.

Mr. Cadogan said that the purpose of the program was simply to offer Yahoo users more relevant information. He added that Yahoo would give some nonprofit organizations like the Library of Congress the ability to add pages to its index without paying. (While Yahoo's paid inclusion program is available to any business that can enter a credit card number on its Web site, the nonprofit version will be open only to a select group of organizations.)

Yahoo says its program is in compliance with Federal Trade Commission guidelines on paid inclusion programs because the payments are disclosed to any user who clicks on the "what's this" link that appears on each search.

Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, argued that such disclosures were not enough. He compared search results with the news articles in newspapers or magazines, which are independent of advertising.

"Any time you accept money to influence the results, even if it is just for inclusion, it is probably a bad thing," Mr. Page said.

Re:Text of Article

[barthrh2]

There is nothing wrong with paid inclusion. Inktomi has been doing it for ages. You used to be able to submit to Inktomi for free via Hotbot, but that got cut off.

Some services (Inktomi again, I think) allow you to pay for "deep searching". The spider will crawl deeper into your site and index more pages.

There are two ways to view this. On one hand, being indexed provides a benefit to the publisher. But doing the indexing takes $ and resources. This practice says that they'll index more, but for a price.

However, it will create more pages from sites with the financial resources to pay for the crawling. This could tilt results towards commercial sites.

Regardless, searches couldn't get worse. It seems like shopping portals have dominated the search results lately.

This is why Yahoo cannot beat Google

[teetam]

There is a fundamental difference in the approaches of these two companies.

Google decides what to do, tries to do it very well and if possible, tries to make money of it. Their primary purpose seems to be to do a good job. Take google news for example - it is an excellent service and I don't see how they make money off that.

Yahoo on the other hand, would gladly sacrifice excellence in their service, for money. Nothing wrong with making money (I am behind capitalism 100%), but companies that make money by doing their job well will succeed in the long run.

The sooner Yahoo learns this, the better it is for them.

Re:This is why Yahoo cannot beat Google

[X]

Congratulations on completely misunderstanding what is going on here. Paid inclusion will only improve Yahoo's ratings. All it means is that a site will get spidered more often than it otherwise would. It doesn't effect ranking.

If you think that Google doesn't have similar deals with some of it's partners (like OSDN and AOL), you're sadly mistaken.

Re:This is why Yahoo cannot beat Google

[De]

> Take google news for example - it is an excellent
> service and I don't see how they make money off
> that.

You're not looking hard enough then.
They don't make money off of Google News itself, but it brings you to their site. The more you're on Google, the more likely you are to use Google's search features - the ones that make them money.

This is sort of the old web portal stuff, but without trying to throw everything on one page and overwhelming the user.

Re:This is why Yahoo cannot beat Google

[IntelliTubbie]

Google decides what to do, tries to do it very well and if possible, tries to make money of it ...Yahoo on the other hand, would gladly sacrifice excellence in their service, for money.

It's not that Yahoo is greedy and Google isn't, or even that Yahoo is greedier than Google. It's that Google is long term greedy whereas Yahoo is short term greedy. (Note that I'm using greedy in the non-pejorative sense here.)

Google wisely recognizes that it's sometimes better to build a quality product over time and then cash in than it is to trade quality, reputation, and higher future profits for a quick buck. Short term greed is a common affliction of public companies, like Yahoo, who have shareholders and analysts breathing down their necks every quarter for immediate results. Privately held Google has the luxury of taking their time ... although I wonder if this will change after the IPO.

Cheers,
IT

Re:This is why Yahoo cannot beat Google

[0x0d0a]

Could you provide a link to support your claim, please?

Paid listings are what ruined altavista

[MichaelCrawford]

AltaVista used to be a great search engine before they started taking paid listings.

Many other search engines - most of which you're not likely to have ever heard of - have always taken paid listings.

Users quickly find that search engines that use paid placement do not return relevant search results.

Yahoo might make a few quick bucks at first, but once users figure out that it's not giving them the most relevant results, they'll go find a different search engine that works better.

I think the way Google does it, with the adwords select self-service ads, is probably the best way a search engine can make money. One reason it works so well is that the user can distinguish easily between paid and unpaid placement.

Re:Paid listings are what ruined altavista

[Sycraft-fu]

And, as I mentioned in other posts, this can actually increase effectivness of ads for online stores. You KNOW they are there to sell you something so that's where you look when you want to buy something.

So many of these online advertisers suffer from stupidity in that they think if they can just trick a user into seeing their page, the person will spend lots of money. Of course the actual result is users get real quick on the back and/or close key and get angry at people who do that.

The opposite is also true to some extent. I've had a number of searches in the past where I didn't want information about an item, I want to buy one. However all I'd get is informational pages. I'd have to piddle with the search syntax to turn up some stores.

With the Google system, you know that those links are bought and paid for. You know they want to sell you something because of it. So if you want to buy, you go over there. It obviously works since plenty of people continue to pay to have their ads there.

building the better search engine

[TheSHAD0W]

Let Yahoo fiddle around as much as they want. If they break their page's usefulness they'll lose even more marketshare to Google. If they utilize the extra income to make their search engine turn up more cogent terms more quickly, they may turn out to be the superior model. Let the market rule.

Google/NYTimes reg. bypass

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo to Charge for Guaranteeing a Spot on Its Index

Re:Google/NYTimes reg. bypass

[macgyvr64]

Note the "partneu8GOOGLE" in that link!

Pay for the internet

[nmoog]

As the amount of web advertising increases, and as people get used to paying for things on the internet, general web users are getting the message "There's no such thing as a free lunch". Darl believes it, everyone who works in advertising believes it, and everyone who pays those advertisers wants you to believe it.

Google doesn't need to trick people into clicking on Amazon, neither should Yahoo.

I personally am searching around for a good BBS in the area, and getting back to the roots.

They already charge for there directory anyway.

[jkcity]

yahoo already ruined there site when they started requiring every site to pay to be reviewed to be in there directory, it was a great directory before this but only business people can generally afford to throw money at getting there site listed certainly some mofo hosting his useful but small site on tripod can't.

They still must add a few sites themselvwes though as mys ite did get added intot he directory but without a description probably because I did'nt pay up for the description lol.

GOOD , Maybe Ill start using it in stead of Google

[MajorDick]

I am getting a bit frustrated with the increasingly poor quality of google responses. It seems like an increasing number of people are writing pages and scripts for things to have some bullshit generic redirect page waiting to scoop your traffic up. With those odd assed 3 mile long URL that are built from some kind of search stat or reffer. Now that said these types of traffic leaches are VERY unlikley to actually PAY for something, I can see this as not neccesarily a bad thing. weed out some of the traffic scabbers, This would have to be a nightmare in process for Yahoo's legal team, Wasnt there just a case with someones keyword in a search engine being protected under copyright ?Isnt Yahoo now based on the old HotBot engine ?

M$ will win this one

[superpulpsicle]

Yahoo search: gates
Result: Microsoft

Yahoo search: viagra
Result: Microsoft

Yahoo search: apple
Result: Microsoft

Yahoo search: linux
Result: Microsoft

Yahoo search: porn
Result: Microsoft

Yahoo search: penguin
Result: Microsoft

Re:M$ will win this one

[Anonymous Coward]

and your super cool

What a Shame

[dupper]

I, a diehard Google supporter (fanboy, even), have cautiously tried out the new Yahoo more than a few times since the last Slashdot story, and was even considering adding it to my Mozilla address bar search. That would have been a major, major coup on their part, as I, a Google fanboy, hadn't even looked at their site since around '98, when I switch to Altavista (shortly followed by Google). And not only did they lose my business, but they lost all my less geeky friends who trust my endorsement (I've presonally switched at least a dozen users to Slashdot, Fark and Mozilla). And if they almost had someone like me, they were in good shape.But, now, I won't even consider it, again. They almost had me, but they got greedy and fucked it up.

AskJeeves Denounces Paid Inclusion.

[ron_ivi]

CNet's reporting that AskJeeves denounces paid inclusion

" AskJeeves will stop accepting advertiser payments for inclusion in its searchable Web database, a move to draw competitive lines between it and Yahoo's new search engine."

Re:AskJeeves Denounces Paid Inclusion.

[wik]

I just asked jeeves whether he denounced it and given that the top 5 links are "Sponsored web links", he certainly does support it.

On the other hand, has anyone ever gotten a straight answer out of Jeeves? I didn't think so.

What could it hurt?

[GoMMiX]

Tried typing education in google? You get like a billion lame online-colleges. Most of which aren't even colleges - but rather referers or advertising programs FOR online colleges that are there merely to collect personal information. IMO there's nothing wrong with Yahoo! making a buck off search listings. There a business, they're here to make money. They're offering a service that costs nothing to use - they gotta make a buck somewhere. I haven't seen anyone complain about the Microsoft ads here on Slashdot - hell, some of them are funny as hell! (namely the ad for FP 2003 - OMG that's so funny!) So what's the ruckus about? Good for you, yahoo! - make some money. In the end, if you don't like it - don't use it! Personally, I'll be sticking to google. I suppose I'm just loyal. If I DID use Yahoo!, though, I would certainly understand paid listings/indexing.

Re:What could it hurt?

[0x0d0a]

What do you expect a search for "education" to return?

I walked up to a person, and asked him to find data associated with "education", I expect I'd get a wide range of crap too.

If I asked him to find me data associated with "funding higher education" or "adult education in cabaras county" or "corruption in kansas public education systems", I might get something usable. Shockingly enough, Google does a pretty good job if given this data.

The search engine cannot read your mind -- you *have* to give it enough data to work with. If I can't expect a person to give me useful data for a search, I can't reasonably expect a search engine to do so.

Re:What could it hurt?

[Lukey Boy]

The first group of results for that query seem relevant, containing links to eductional directories, the National Education Association, etc.

Re:What could it hurt?

[TJmoney]

With Google at least, you know the paid listings are off to the right, and know exactly where to look if your actually looking for an institution to get an education at if you search for "education." If you're looking for papers or news arcticles on education, at least the paid ads are seperated out, which it doesent sound like they will on Yahoo.

"Search Engine Spam"

[smr2x]

What's with all the complaining about search engine spam? I've been searching for a long time, and when I look at a result and see "canon-print.free-stuff.make-a-deal.biz" I just skip it. It's not really that hard, so what's the big deal?

All it takes is a little common sense and about an eighth of a second to skip it.

Re:"Search Engine Spam"

[sparrow_hawk]

Which is, honest to gosh, what they said about e-mail and Usenet spam back in the days of Cantor and Spiegel, the infamous Green Card Lawyers, when a single spam e-mail was an anomaly. And the method worked, too, until the signal-to-noise ratio on global e-mail correspondance started diving toward zero. The Web isn't there yet, but it's heading that way.

I would bet a lot that Google is training a Bayesian algorithm on "canon-print.free-stuff.make-a-deal.biz" and friends right now. If they aren't, they should be.

bullshit on this!

[pair-a-noyd]

I'm fscking sick off all the gdmf commercial sites that float up like turds that won't flush.

When I enter HP Laserjet IIIsi I get 400,000 freaking sites peddling toner and ink refills but I have to dig through dozens of pages of bullshit to find tech info like parts lists or diagrams.

I wish they would implement a new switch or two in search engines,

HP Laserjet IIIsi -commercial -for profit +usefull

Re:bullshit on this!

[nastyphil]

So why don't you serach for something like HP Laserjet IIIsi +~parts +~diagram

Re:bullshit on this!

[perimorph]

Most people purchase ink refills far more frequently than they need technical specifications for a printer. I think it's natural that such sites would rank higher in the results for that search. It would be either nice or 1984-ish if a search engine could read our minds, but we're just not there yet. Although such switches would be useful, perhaps searching for HP Laserjet IIIsi "Parts List" would yield the results you'd like. The more specific you are, the fewer unwanted results you get.

Re:bullshit on this!

[Anonymous Coward]

The most obvious of such tricks don't help because the 400000 toner peddlers are using every trick known to man to get Google to link to their sites... through as many link-farm sites as possible.

Re:bullshit on this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, the toner sellers that actually give you the best prices, as opposed to telling you "we have the best prices" and then charging twice as much, are found on pages 31-300 in the google results, right next to the actual technical information. There is a clear correlation between high google-spamming efforts and high prices, and it seems clear that this correlation is caused by low ethics.

Re:bullshit on this!

[Lehk228]

what's the point of a search engine if the computer can read your mind, why not just have the relevant page be open when you sit down

Fundamental Flaw In This Business Model?

[Cycline3]

Isn't there a fundamental flaw in the logic here? People use search engines to find information they want, not to look at who paid the most to be listed first.

I can see where portals are struggling to make the bills, but this seems like shooting yourself in the foot to keep your toothache from hurting.

I for one am not impressed with the continued commercialization of the Internet. I hope this fad comes and goes quickly. *fingers crossed.*

Wow! Paid results! Good-bye Google!

[rjamestaylor]

Yeah, right. Real heart warming, Yahoo.

Pffffbbbbbbbt.

The reason Google kicked ass in 1999 (when I found it; so call me a late comer, it's ok) is that it

1) Was simple
2) Was clean
3) Wasn't a portal
4) Gave honest results

The reason it continues to kick ass is that it
1) Left the 1999 values in place
2) Clearly demarks paid results from algorithmic
3) Provides honest results (including countermanding manipulation attempts)

Reagrding a being portal: if Google added email I'd be interested. If it added a "my" page, I'd sign up. Google has impressed me to no end unlike almost any other popular web site (I'd have to add Groklaw to my list of trusted sites; and LWN).

If Yahoo wants to replace Google in my life it needs to undo years of bad moves. "Launch," anyone? Funny thing is, I use Yahoo as my email host (and I pay for it); I even have the same my.yahoo.com page I first made in 1999. It's still my browser's home page. But I spend far more time using Google than using Yahoo, even though I'm commited to so many services Yahoo provides. The first time I was tempted to change home pages was when Google News came out. I did change, for a while. But my email is with Yahoo. All it would take to make me a Google Goon would be for Google to offer email services.

So, the news that Yahoo will skew results for the highest bidder doesn't concern me -- I haven't used Yahoo search in ... 6 months? Maybe once a month prior to that?

My!Yahoo may be my start page, but my browser, Firefox, has Google built-in "every" page I visit (and I doubt that's because Google paid the Open Source project to do it).

Bye Yahoo. Thanks for employing Jeremy Zawodny and letting him talk/write about MySQL. Thanks for having a fairly decent email service (not thanks for not opening up an alernate port to port 25 which is blocked by many ISPs). Thanks, but I don't know how long I'll be around. Couple months, maybe just due to inertia.

Re:Wow! Paid results! Good-bye Google!

[mabu]

Amen

Yes, it will make for inferior search results...

[ElliotLee]

...but who defines "relevance"? There are often thousands of web sites on the Internet that are equally relevant to certain search terms.

Ultimately, as long as people find something halfway decent, your everyday Joe will not notice and they will go on their happy way using Yahoo, a well-known name in his mind, for search.

All the while making Yahoo filthy rich.

Won't make a difference

[Bill_Royle]

Look - if a search engine was a schoolbus, Yahoo would be the short one.

When Yahoo and Google learn how to properly catalog php pages without requiring mod_rewrite fudging by website owners, perhaps then it'd be worth investing in some ads. After all, if website owners can get it to work, why can't they?

Also - when Yahoo can effectively filter out the link-redirect scams going on, it might be more enticing for potential advertisers. Paying for the "opportunity" to be listed amongst top-ranking link scammers isn't worth much, IMHO.

As for websurfers, I'd suggest Vivisimo. There's nothing better than clustered results!

The Seperation of Church and State in Media

[LostCluster]

All media outlets, be they web sites, TV channels, radio stations, newspapers, or whatever else all have the same core business. They attract an audience using some form of content and then try to divert that audience to people who pay them called sponsors.

The key thing is, these two operations within the media outlet have opposing goals. The content side has to tell it like it is, while the sponsors want to use the outlet to get out their message. They're at odds with each other, they always have been and always will be.

The key thing is, the content people try to maintain that their image is more important than the income of the sales staff. That is to say, sometimes they want to publish information that the sponsors would rather not see published. A good media outlet has to do such a thing sometimes, it's about maintaining credibility.

Of course, the sponsors would want such stories spiked. And, they'd also like to blur the line between what is content and what is a paid ad as much as possible.

History has shown, that sometimes cash-crunched media outlets will agree to let their credibility be compromised in order to make some quick bucks from a sponsor. In nearly every case, such quick bucks come, but eventually the credibility loss gets to the point that there's no audience left, therefore nothing to sell to the sponsors, and the media operation is out of business.

So... it'll be interesting to see how well Yahoo is able to keep the paid inclusion system from corrupting its content of results.

Of course, Google has already made arrangements to crawl news sites more frequently than others, and even get into registration-requiring sites that would otherwise be inaccessable to GoogleBot. Froogle is Google's attempt to do the same for shopping sites. The key thing is, however, that Google is asking for no money to be included in Froogle, just maybe a little help in geting their bot past the doors.

Yahoo may see some short term money from this effort, but they'd better watch just what they're selling, otherwise they may end up killing what little of a golden goose they have left over there.

maybe..

[ambienceman]

this won't have much relevance because it said that this action was targeting "companys"...not "companies". So who are these companys?

Yahoo misses the point, again...

[linuxtelephony]

People that use the search engines appreciate NOT having paid placements confused with real placements.

Yahoo isn't even really out of the gate and they already miss the point that brings people to the search engine to begin with.

Probably the best news Google had today.

I like Google's method

[Sycraft-fu]

You have a clear differentiation between paid links and Google's search. This does not mean, however, that people never go to the paid links. On the contrary, which section I look in depends on what my objective is. If it is information I want, I look at normal links. However, if I'm looking for places to buy, I look at the paid links. Google is very good at returning stores that are actually carrying the product I searched for.

I think it's the best paid system I've seen. Pay to increase rank systems piss me off because they often lead to misleading results.

Web based searching?

[weeboo0104]

I still gopher you insensitive clod!

Guh

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost every post on this page should get modded offtopic or redundant. What the companies are paying for is more frequent spidering of their sites, NOT heightened status among search results. Yeesh, does no one actually read what is posted?

Oh, yeah. This is slashdot.

Better yet

[Sycraft-fu]

Google ALSO gives you links to retailers, but you know what they are. It's also good at making them quite relivant. So if after you read the research sites you decide you want one, you have an easy place to find stores that will sell you one. However it is clear, up front, that the intent is sales, and that they paid to be there.

Slashdot, that pillar of journalism.

[X]

Okay, let's correct all the things the slashdot summary got wrong:

• Payments will not boost prominence. They will only increase the frequency of spidering. No impact on results ranking
• The data feed is essentially like meta-data in the web page: Yahoo's engine determines whether it's trustworthy or not.
• The for-profit and not-for-profit announcements are related, because they are both use the same technology to work.

Re:Slashdot, that pillar of journalism.

[Super70s]

Wrong. My site's prominence at Yahoo is ZERO right now because they are demanding payment - TO BE INCLUDED AT ALL! Thus, if I give in to their extortion, I will be boosting my prominence. Slashdot got it right.

I suggest you get your own facts straight before questioning their Slashdot's journalism.

Re:Slashdot, that pillar of journalism.

[X]

Nice troll, and congratulations on using Slashdot to help move your domain up on Google ;-). A quick search clearly shows that Yahoo already has you indexed and as the first choice for at least once query.

New Buzzword!

[telstar]

It's not "Merchandizing", it's "Searchandizing".

I forgot the most important thing

[rjamestaylor]

Google gives accurate results. That's the most important thing about Google search results: they're accurate.

When I want to download a new version of the ssh client I use on Windows machines, I goto Google and type "putty" in the search field. Then I hit enter.

Every time I am brought through the "deep web of billions of pages" to the most relevant site for Internet users looking for something called "putty." No, it's not SillyPutty (that's second.) It's not Home Depot. It is www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ which is the home of PuTTY, the Windows SSH client extraordinaire.

The Yahoo spokesperson who spun Yahoo's paid results as a benefit to using the "deep web" hopes his listeners aren't Internet users. Or, at least, aren't Google users. We don't fall for that crap.

Re:I forgot the most important thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you actualy typed "putty" into the Yahoo.com engine, it returns the following in the top 3 positions. Before making critisism you should check your facts

1. PuTTY
download for the free win32 telnet/ssh client.
Category: Unix Networking Utilities > Ssh (Secure Shell)
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty - 4k - Cached - More pages from this site

2. PuTTY Download Page ... PuTTY Download Page. Home | Licence | FAQ | Docs | Download | Keys ... Here are the PuTTY files themselves: PuTTY (the Telnet and SSH client itself ...
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/do wnloa d.html - 24k - Cached - More pages from this site

3. PuTTY: a free Win32 telnet/ssh client ... PuTTY: A Free Win32 Telnet/SSH Client ... LEGAL WARNING: Use of PuTTY, PSCP, PSFTP and Plink is illegal in countries where encryption is outlawed ...
www.putty.nl/ - 4k - Cached
Debian GNU/Linux -- putty
Telnet/SSH client for X
packages.debian.org/unstable/net/putty.html

Re:I forgot the most important thing

[rjamestaylor]

You would have really caught me there -- if I was saying Yahoo didn't return PuTTY as the first results for the search term "putty". :)

My post focused on the consistent usefulness of Google. Previously I complained about Yahoo agreeing to insert paid links in their search results. That sucks. Google (as far as I know) does not do that and yet manages to be relevant and accurate. Yahoo excusing their deviation from the realm of the ethical search provider by saying doing so will result in better search results is blowing smoke.

I never claimed Yahoo didn't give PuTTY as a first result. That's irrelevant.

Please take a refresher in reading comprehension before flying off the handle.

Re:I forgot the most important thing

[T3kno]

Way OT, but the last time there was a Google flame thread on /. I found this site Search Guild that has a directory of all kinds of search engines. Some work better than others, most suck, but the most interesting one that I found was Kartoo a flash based search engine. As much as I loathe flash, this site is pretty cool. A search for putty on the World Wide Web, brings up a page with several page icons and some words. The chiark.greenend... site is linked to the words source and free, clicking on either searches within your results. Thus clicking on source brings a page of links to the source code of putty and some source packages that reference it. It's a little slow to use, definately not as fast as Google, but a cool idea none the less. Something like this will be schweet once SVG is supported natively by real browsers.

Re:I forgot the most important thing

[rjamestaylor]

I'll check it out. Say, do you think you could make a SWF search engine that could grab the users email address and...oh, never mind....

Guarantees?

[ThisIsFred]

I'd be worried about the companies that do pay. There are a lot of decoys, meta tag garbage etc., out there that exist solely to game the system, and bring in as much traffic as possible to junk domains. This is done without the consent or control of the search engine providers. I haven't seen Yahoo's rates, but those who mistakenly believe they can use the Internet as their own big billboard are in for a surprise; It isn't categorized like a phone book, where the publisher has a reasonably accurate assumption of how the reader will go about finding information. It's basically a free-for-all. Traditional advertising in many regions may be more work (and more costly), but it'll probably bring in more consistent results than a search engine.

If Yahoo is successfully picks up a lot of paying advertisers, they will become one of those aforementioned junk domains that you get redircted to. You know, the ones with about a million advertising links on one page, hawking every conceivable type of product? If that happens, why would web users even bother going to Yahoo?

What about "REFERRER" headers?

[whoever57]

And Yahoo will give paying clients detailed reports on when its users click on their sites and will help those sites improve their listings.

So does this mean that Yahoo is going to munge the URL that is returned from a search so that webmasters can't make sense of the REFERRER headers from their logfiles? Or do they just think that webmasters simply don't realize that this information is available?

Re:What about "REFERRER" headers?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's "REFERRER"? I only speak HTTP.

Re:What about "REFERRER" headers?

[Anonymous Coward]

he means REFERER

Re:What about "REFERRER" headers?

[wysiwyg0]

Yes, but how will the webmasters discover the *queries* for which their results came up??

Re:What about "REFERRER" headers?

[whoever57]

Yes, but how will the webmasters discover the *queries* for which their results came up??

Presently, the URL given in the REFERRER header includes the search query, with most search engines.

We need an open, free (speech) search engine

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo is now dramatically tainting their searches.

Google openly censors content and uses a closed and opaque ranking method.

We need a search engine backed by a registered non-profit as much as we need (and have in Debian) a Linux distribution backed by a registered non-profit. Our freedom depends upon this.

The benefit to society of the access to information offerred through a search engine - absolutely unprecedented in the history of humanity - is so great, and so essential, that we can not allow it to be controlled by, directed by the interests of, or in any other way tainted by a private corporation. It is as essential as, and essential to, that every U.S. citizen or citizen or non-citizen of any nation, regardless of class, age, or creed, have access to the services and information made available from our government through the internet. Information on contraception, on health, on parental and spousal abuse, on the advances in science, on the access to medicine, on the advancement of the arts, and on the political process and how to contribute and take a stake and a stand in the governance of one's own life at the highest level.

The search process must be transparent, its administrators ultimately powerless and accountable, and its managers elected. Only in this way can the information that will free us be free.

It needs to be an international effort, so that information (a link) that can not legally be presented in one country (say, due to the dmca), can be maintained on a mirror in another country.

Digest distribution must be made available through mail-order, and free of charge to those who can not on their own afford access to it.

It is knowledge that will set us free. It is our right and our entitlement to and from one another as beings endowed by their Creator with an infinite dignity and value, for all, in brotherhood.

Re:We need an open, free (speech) search engine

[Anonymous Coward]

so get coding.

ohhhh, you wanted someone else to do the work.
its not as easy as it seems.

but like i said, get coding if you feel that strongly about it.

Re:We need an open, free (speech) search engine

[cerebralpc]

If your so smart why don't you invent one.

Re:We need an open, free (speech) search engine

[Anonymous Coward]

www.nutch.org

No, it's 'renounce'

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, you'd expect a news source to know the difference. You renounce something you formely did, like the wacky drugs. You denounce something you've never done, like the wackier drugs.

Re:No, it's 'renounce'

[Anonymous Coward]

:-) Cool description. Now even I'll remember it.

I think the free market will sort this out...

[Junior J. Junior III]

No one's forcing anyone to use Yahoo, I'm sure that as the links Yahoo provides its customers with become suckier, the customers will flee to other search sites that suck less. How is Yahoo becoming an advertising company that masquerades as a world wide web index infringing on anyone's rights?

Yahoo is still a search engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't Yahoo'ed since Google declared bush a "dumb motherfucker".

Have you?

Your Rights Online?

[AdEbh]

I don't think this a very good idea, but effecting my "rights"? I did not know I had any rights over Yahoo's business model.

I almost suspect sometimes

[Anonymous Coward]

I almost suspect sometimes that the criteria for which stories go into the YRO section is "is this the sort of story that the people who have YRO stories on block in their slashdot prefs would want to avoid seeing?"

If so, it's a good criteria.

In other news, the sky is blue...

[mabu]

Yahoo turned into a mafia site several years ago when they started charging people for listings in their directory, and then would reject sites if they were listed in other categories (after you paid a hefty non-refundable fee). Screw 'em. I sold off my stock a long time ago and don't expect them to go anywhere. It's too little, too late. Let's hope that Google doesn't get so mercinary that they blow their market share like Yahoo did.

Yahoo is dead. They have a decent mail service which everyone uses to hide their identity while they troll for mistresses online, but other than that, the site is useless.

But you can't trust Google results either...

[Anonymous Coward]

...because you have absolutely no certain idea or assurance that the ranking was done in a fair and correct manner.

Their ranking method - in the details that actually matter - is completely opaque. And what their ranking method is, or whether they follow it consistently, is entirely impossible to know because they are a private corporation and are accountable only to the great and mighty Profit. Profit isn't affected by incorrect or unfair rankings so long as no one knows whether the rankings are corrent and fair, but just naievely believes they are.

alltheweb.com

[robogun]

Why don't you step over to alltheweb.com Like google without the spam. As many pages are indexed. The only difference I can see is that they don't cache.

Re:alltheweb.com

[Anonymous Coward]

The only difference I can see is that they don't cache.

Or advertise. Or do anything effective to get themselves into the public eye.

Which is why I'm not personally considering them as a contestant in the upcoming Google vs MS war.

Re:alltheweb.com

[zangdesign]

Their sponsored links are not as easy to spot as Google's. At least Google makes an effort to clearly delineate who's paid for an ad, and where the real results start.

Well, aside from getting stuck in the link farms.

I wasn't charged

[Long-EZ]

I made a couple of websites to test some web authoring software, and to help define a potential product I wanted to develop. I never submitted them to any search engines. Several months later, I started getting quite a bit of email inquiries, even though the website clearly stated that a product was not yet for sale. I quickly took the sites down to avoid advertising vaporware.

I assumed Google had finally indexed the sites. Nope. It was Yahoo. My sites were listed high on the first page for several likely search strings. That would be good if I was actually selling a product.

I don't mind the way Google sells Google AdWords, as long as they continue to index just about any page and have very broad coverage. The advertising rates are very modest compared to other types of ads, the ads are very well targeted, with brief, tactful and informative text. No trees are killed, and the ads are clearly seperated from the non-advertised search results. They seem to be everything that weasel spammers claim to be but aren't. I like the Google advertising approach, both as a potential advertiser, and as a Joe Sixpack web surfer who sometimes looks for weird non-commercial stuff, and sometimes wants to find a place where I can buy a product. In fact, I'd very much like some way to tell a search engine that I want to buy something or I don't, and get relevant search results.

Yahoo would do well to exactly copy the Google approach to search engine advertising.

Re:I wasn't charged

[alphakappa]

If it was a few months ago, there is a good chance that the results were provided to Yahoo! by Google, since as you know Yahoo! search was powered by Google. Are you perfectly sure the results were not available in Google? or that the results did not die out when they attempted to reindex your pages after you took them down?

Re:I wasn't charged

[jdkane]

Instead of going through the bother of putting up sites and then having to take them down again, you might want to use a robots.txt file to tell search engines not to index your content yet. I know -- off-topic -- but a helpful hint none-the-less.

Re:I wasn't charged

[Long-EZ]

Yahoo indexed the pages a little less than a month ago. I checked Google and there were no hits on my search phrases. Then I checked Yahoo and it had lots of highly ranked hits. Then I took down the site, although Yahoo still has a cached version.

And, yeah, I could have used a robots.txt file to avoid indexing. I didn't because I thought there would be a real product long before the site was indexed without me submiting it. Yeah, right. Other work appeared that buried me for several months.

Even better question....

[raehl]

Why is accepting payment necessarily bad?

I know that when I do google searches for commercial product, the results in the advertiser links are 90% better (better = useful sites are in the advertiser links as opposed to the regular results 90% of the time) than results in the regular search.

Why?

Because in the commercial space, people willing to pay some money for a listing are also people who are generally much more able to provide the product I'm looking for. It's a lot harder for people who want to "fake" having a relevant site (and direct you to porn) to PAY for listings than to create misleading networks of links.

I think the real solution here is to let the user select whether they're searching for something in the commercial space or not. Give control to the user.

Re:Even better question....

[Anonymous Coward]

By having paying in to have your site ranked higher makes the wealthy commercial sites gain a stronger hold on what the user can search. Take for instance the rich Microsoft. If they wanted to buy up the keywords 'Linux' or 'Sex' then instead of directing someone to a useful Linux website they would be directed to a 'Windows is better than Linux' website. Likewise, the user could be directed to a 'Windows is better than Sex' website.

Re:Even better question....

[dthree]

Oveture is based on this exact premise. It is often the best place for a company to go for online advertising.

But how to do you know to that Google is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's ranking method - in the details that actually matter - is completely opaque. We know that Google openly censors content, and all we have is our trust in a profit-centric private corporation that their ranking method is fair and correct beyond the censorship we explicitly know is taking place.

Google is absolutely not accountable. They are accountable to Profit, but the Free Market makes Google accountable to the perception of fairness and correctness, and not the actuality of fairness and correctness. Because Google is completely opaque and completely unaccountable to the actuality of correctness and fairness, Google is completely untrustworthy in all respects that are essential to the free, fair, ordered, and effective access to information that search technology can provide.

Google is useful for one purpose only: finding links to information, the relevance of which in any respective field or social context is completely indeterminate, and the correctness or fairness of which is completely suspect.

But coding is the least of the barriers

[Anonymous Coward]

No. I will absolutely contribute code, money, and research to such a project. The community already has baseline free-open-source search engine code available.

But coding is the least of the barriers to such a project. Financing such a project requires knowledge of it in the community.

Debian manages through an elaborate system of international mirrors. A system of at least this scale would be required.

I am writing letters to leading members of the open source community to try to get these ideas out there. I have a lot of respect for RMS, and it would be great if he could be convinced to talk about something like this.

Re:But coding is the least of the barriers

[martyn s]

Then why are you mentioning this on Slashdot (with an anonymous account?) Why don't you post it somewhere where people care. People are not used to serious posts on slashdot.

Partnering with wikipedia

[arvindn]

Apparently one of the nonprofits they are partnering with is wikipedia. It isn't mentioned in the NY times story, but some other news sites talk about it. I think that makes a lot of sense.

Damn it!

[rffmna]

I hope SCO sign up for "ligitious bastards".

Re:GOOD , Maybe Ill start using it in stead of Goo

[LinuxXPHybrid]

> With those odd assed 3 mile long URL that are built from some kind of search stat or refer. Now that said these types of traffic leaches are VERY unlikely to actually PAY for something, I can see this as not necessarily a bad thing. weed out some of the traffic scabbers, ...

I'm not so sure if I agree with this because some SEO(Search Engine Optimization) firms do recommend to create these 3 mile long URL strings and there is a very big chance that 3 mile long URL strings are created by SEO firms, which, by the way, charge for some hefty fee. So it means that these 3 mile long URL strings websites do have money and they are actually the ones who are likely to spend money to get good listings in Yahoo.

It has been invented, but not funded

[Anonymous Coward]

There already exists baseline FOSS search engine code.

Code I can do. Funding I can not. I can barely afford to feed myself right now as I have been unemployed for nearly 2 months. I can't seem to get callbacks even from retail stores right now in my area.

We need to take this issue to major figures in the FOSS community, to get the word out.

My Rights Online???

[l0ungeb0y]

What I don't get is why this story is posted under "Your Rights Online"

Last I checked, Yahoo was a Corporation and as such has the right to conduct it's business how it damn well chooses.
Whether or not they charge for advertising placement does not effect my online rights nor any other rights. If you don't like Yahooo's approach, it's your right not to use Yahoo.

So can someone tell me how this effects any of my rights as defined by the US Constitution or Court of Law, or is this just another example of a ./ ed not thinking before pulling the trigger?

Re:My Rights Online???

[Super70s]

Here's a quote from the New York Times, to answer your question:
"Yahoo says its program is in compliance with Federal Trade Commission guidelines on paid inclusion programs because the payments are disclosed to any user who clicks on the "what's this" link that appears on each search."

Yahoo claims it is compliant, but that - quite obviously - is not the last word on the subject. It CLEARLY belongs in this category.

Post where?

[Anonymous Coward]

I could try to write an article for something like newsforge also I suppose, but I have never done that - of course I have to start somewhere though.

I don't have any significant personal credientials in the FOSS community, and so I had hoped to inspire some people who may to thinking about these issues. I know that people of influence read Slashdot comments.

See, I would like to make an advocacy site for these ideas, but I can not possibly afford the bandwidth for hosting if it generates any significant interest, as my income (even when I was employed) is very minimal.

I'll look over the options that I can think of.

Re:Post where?

[martyn s]

Okay that sounds cool enough, just trying to point out that you're shoveling shit against the tide in this cesspool here.

First!

[nick_davison]

Now, Taco, that $100 gets me a guaranteed first post, modded to 5, that can't be modded down, right?

I think this could be a good thing

[ChiralSoftware]

I am tired of doing searches and finding the top twenty results all by the same company that has learned how to spam the rankings. You click on one of them and guess what, they don't even have the keyword you were searching for. For example, try a Google search on "ringtones" and the top hits are all the same company in the UK. Search for a specific ringtone you are looking for, and you'll get that same company, even if it doesn't have what you're looking for.

Paid placement would cure this problem. The company that thinks it has the best stuff and is willing to pay for that will get to the top. Right now, Google determines placement by a variety of factors, the most important of which is "voting with links". Switching to paid placement or inclusion is "voting with bucks". Ultimately there is no ideal method of determining placement but "voting with bucks" is not such a bad way to go. Hopefully it will take out many of the spamming sites.

-------
Is your hosting company wireless-enabled?

Better than google - A new search engine

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the search engine that challenges Google and claims it gives well researched reults and is therefore better.

Re:Better than google - A new search engine

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is pretty decent and matches upto google, but for its most popular result. It stinks at times.
Yahoo! we've finally found an alternative, let the rest go to hell.

Better than google ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did try to get some long winding searches and guess what, the results were ok. But boy was it slow! Even though it gave relevant results. Who's got all the time in the world?
I also searched for Slashdot and got its game page and even one in japanese but not our favourite home page.
How enlightening!

The need for open source search engines

[curiuz]

So far we all turn our buttocks at such attempts to infiltrate our searches with commercial interests cos we just migrate to our beloved and trusted google soon to be on the stock exchange btw. But this emphasizes a very important point: With a huge part of our delivery of information channeling through the search engines the need for open source search engines seems as important as the need for open sourcs OS.

Here's another that claims it is better

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's another that claims it is better. Check it out. It uses results from other sources too and lists it in the very first and only page

They have been doing this for ages

[altamira]

...at least in Germany, Yahoo! has been selling the best entries in their directory. The way it worked was: Pay for an advertisement in connection with search words. Be the #1 site when each of the search words was part of a query, and be the #1 site in the directory for the corresponding category for the duration of the campaign. Prices were set depending on the category.

Oh, and I know for sure, as I actually BOUGHT the search words for a customer.

yahoo..

[livhan28]

well its not like i was going to use yahoo search anyway, or not atleast until the clean up that nasty front page of theirs

Yahoo search is now worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo search is now worthless IMO. Fuck off, you greedheads at Yahoo. I will never use your search engine now! Never! Do you hear me? Never! ;)
I hope it was worth it to for the extra money, but as far as I'm concerned your search engine is now worthless.

Re:Gold ship ...

[DerFeuervogel]

The pressure to run the gold ship aground and run off with the loot will always be there.
Nice quote. Can I borrow this?

I'm sticking with google

[Pedrito]

This is precisely why I'll be sticking with Google. For the most part, I'm generally searching for non-commercial sites when I search. If I need commercial sites, I know I can find them at Google, but I also know it's not going to give the non-paying sites a higher ranking just because they pay, in the search results, and that's important to me.

I think Yahoo!, following this same old business model, will simply end up failing in the search engine competition, and that's fine with me.

I honestly can't see how anyone can improve significantly on what Google has done. They're interface is plain and simple, their search results are generally excellent.

Where do I sign up for this site match program?

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Do a Yahoo search on "site match program" limiting the search to the yahoo.com domain. I just did. The result?

Nothing.

That's just too funny.

make sure you bitch when you get irrelevent hits

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet, don't use Yahoo. But if you must, and you click on a link that turns out to be unrelated, you MUST COMPLAIN. Otherwise, it won't be just Yahoo.

1. Accept Paid Advertising
2. Make it look necessary
3. Convince other compainies to do it
4. Profit!! (but no truth)

(yaya.. no ????. Sue me!)

Re:Gold ship ...

[nysus]

Steal it.

Old news

[Xformer]

Yahoo's been charging (as a subscription, even) for listings of commercial sites for years in their main index, and hardly listing any new ones that weren't.

Wrong: Paid Inclusion still available for Jeeves..

[celerityfm]

In the article at the bottom it says "To be clear, Lanzone said that the company will still allow site operators to pay to submit their sites to its index, but that that payment would not guarantee inclusion in the database."

Which goes right along the way Yahoo's new Site Match program works (to quote from their homepage):

"All URLs must pass initial and ongoing quality review to be included. Participation in the program does not guarantee rank in search results; rank is determined by assessing site quality and relevance to search terms."

I fail to see the point of paid inclusion under these circumstances-- in theory (and yes, I know thats the problem), websites should be indexed on a semi-regular basis regardless of whether your are paying the search engine owners or not-- as Google does and as Yahoo has actually been doing (in order to build their index to match Google's).. by just having a relevant site you should rank highly in the search results. All of this in theory of course.

In reality most sites that are relevant DO rank highly in the search results for most terms-- this NEW paid inclusion program for both Jeeves and Yahoo is just a transitionatory phase between total inclusion and no paid inclusion whatsoever. Right now they say "sure you can still give us your money.. and yeah if your relevant we'll index you.." but if your relevant you'll probably already be indexed!

Tisk tisk

[Dan667]

Yahoo Day 1: Wow what a great technology we have developed. Yahoo Day 2: Hello foot. *Bam* (what was that)...

Well, this just solidifies Google's dominance

[laddhebert]

I suppose this is great news for google. I'm sure at first they were a bit worried that their users would migrate to the new Yahoo search engine, but if Yahoo is going this route, they have nothing to worry about. Yahoo will just remain one of the "other" search engines out there.

-L

Visualize Yahoo vs. Google

[EvanKai]

Christian Langreiter has written an interesting tool that visually compares the results of a Yahoo vs. Google search. Will be really interesting to watch the deviation change as Yahoo skews their ranks for $$... not that Google hasn't been skewed by A-List bloggers for years.

in defense of paid inclusion

[Alan]

Jeremy Zawody, a Yahoo employee, but speaking only for himself in his personal blog had this to say in defense of paid inclusion.

Google is paid placement too: tweakers get paid

[polymorpheus]

The spammers, tweakers, and whatever-you-want-to-call-them -- those people rigging Google's rankings to get their sites on top, get paid for this service, so indirectly it's paid placement. Only Google doesn't get paid! Yahoo is being smart by cutting out this middleman.

Live, Long, and Prosper.
Polymorph

owned by Yahoo!?

[polymorpheus]

I thought AllTheWeb.com is owned by Overture which was bought by Yahoo!, or maybe AllTheWeb.com was purchased independently by Yahoo! In any case, AllTheWeb.com is Yahoo!'s.

It's Official

[HaveNoMouth]

So it's now official. Yahoo has jumped the shark.

It's Really Just An AdWords Clone

[cgreuter]

So just now, I went to Yahoo and did a couple of searches. The top three or so links were clearly marked as "sponsor links" and were followed by the actual (relevant) results, also clearly marked. In other words, they're doing the same thing that Google does with AdWords, namely using the search criteria to serve up relevant ads. The ads are kept separate from the real content so that they don't reduce the actual quality of their service.

(One of my test searches was for Squeak, the free Smalltalk system. The real results were all relevant but one fo the ads went,

Squeaks on eBay. Find squeaks items at low prices.

Ya gotta love EBay.)

Professional appearance

[mforbes]

I agree with you, but the reason for me has more to do with the style of the page posting the ad than it does anything else. Google's ads are presented well and are unobtrusive. They forgo all the blinking & 'moving around' crap that makes so many banners so damned awful, and they're attractive to view.

First impressions matter a lot in this world. More companies would do well to keep their interfaces as clean as Google.

Yahoo's extortion must be challenged!

[Super70s]

I put together a pair of nostalgia sites (Super70s.com and Awesome80s.com). The eBay and AMZN ads I've put up have never come close to paying for even the ISP charges, but that's okay as it's a labor of love. However, it's really frustrating to create this site (thousands of pages) and then have the likes of Yahoo refuse to index it (any or it) without a big cash contribution.

Independent sites not backed by corporate dollars are the ones significantly hurt by Yahoo's unethical* approach. It is either a form of censorship or extortion to keep sites like mine from the results of a search of the Internet.

I NEVER accept questionable ads (porn, gambling). I do not do popups and never have. I do not run banner ads on the top of pages (and never have). I've never spammed nor will I. In short, I've played by the rules.

Similar sites who have broken all those rules (and more) will have no trouble writing a check and those who don't know the difference between Google and Yahoo will, unfortunately, end up on those sites instead.

Yahoo will gladly take all this into account, so long as I write it on the back of a yearly check.

Yahoo is ten times the threat to sites like mine than M$FT ever thought of being. It's extortion and I can only hope there will be enough backlash to make them rethink their plans.

Those of you here at Slashdot have influence with your friends, coworkers, and family. PLEASE, for the sake of us independents, get them off Yahoo and on to Google!

I'm sorry if this sounds like whining to any of you. I just ask that you put yourself in my place and then ask yourself if you wouldn't feel the same.

Thanks for "listening",
Patrick Mondout

-- *They have spent a decade building up a positive reputation with netizens and do not do nearly enough to inform those who use their search that their search results are merely ads for the sites that paid to be there.

Futurama Quote

[DjMd]

Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines...and movies...and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and written in the sky. But not in dreams. No siree!

Better add search engines to that list, oh what horrible bleak future^H^H^H^H^H^H^H present we live in...