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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.")"
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?
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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.
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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.
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So...unless I'm not getting this, they're making it sound as though advertisers pay for...nothing. Which clearly isn't correct
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.
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. . .
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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?
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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.*
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
May we never see th
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.
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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?
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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?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
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.
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.
The posting is also misleading. "Your rights online?" WTF? You have a RIGHT to equitable search engine placement?
Where the hell is that written?
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.
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.
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.
...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...
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;)