Slashdot Mirror
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?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
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.
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
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.
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
So...unless I'm not getting this, they're making it sound as though advertisers pay for...nothing. Which clearly isn't correct
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.
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.
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.
All your favorite sites in one place!
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.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
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.
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.
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
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?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!