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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.")"
It's not perfect, but the Open Directory Project is a better Web directory. It powers the Google Directory as well.
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
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. -Chomsky
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.
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.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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.
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
--- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
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.
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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.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Yahoo to Charge for Guaranteeing a Spot on Its Index
" 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."
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.
sigs are a waste of space
sigs are a waste of space
So why don't you serach for something like HP Laserjet IIIsi +~parts +~diagram
Dialectician. Archology.
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.
.25 per keyword per year. Yeah Right!! .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.
You obviously aren't that familiar with the PPC (Pay Per Click) industry. Google and overture(yahoo) both charge a minimum of
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.
Oh, are they ?
linky
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 :(
"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.
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:
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.If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.