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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.")"
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.
...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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
One bad monkey spoils the whole barrel.
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.
"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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, right. Real heart warming, Yahoo.
... 6 months? Maybe once a month prior to that?
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
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.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
The first ever Ultimate Frisbee video game: here (now
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.
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.
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.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
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.
paintball
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.
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
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?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
The benefit to advertiser is clear: Google is the
ONLY place on the net where I click on ad links.
I am not alone...
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.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
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.
I don't try to be right, I just try to make people think
What I don't get is why this story is posted under "Your Rights Online"
./ ed not thinking before pulling the trigger?
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
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.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
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?
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.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
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.
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.
"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."