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.")"
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.
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.
"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...
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.
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
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
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.