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

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: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?

[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: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.