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.")"

I don't get it.

[Trejkaz (615352)]

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?

Re:I don't get it.

[LostCluster (625375)]

"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...

Re:I don't get it.

[asteinberg (521580)]

Everyone's talking about how Google clearly separates its ads from its search results, and yes, that is nice, but I think Google has something else going for its advertising service that nobody seems to be noticing.

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.

Re:I don't get it.

[Compuser (14899)]

The benefit to advertiser is clear: Google is the
ONLY place on the net where I click on ad links.
I am not alone...

Re:I don't get it.

[obeythefist (719316)]

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?

Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[chrisopherpace (756918)]

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.

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[ron_ivi (607351)]

Remember way back [archive.org] when Yahoo had a simple interface with only two images on the very-quickly loading home page.

That was back [archive.org] when they cared about user experience and their stock was at an all time high [yahoo.com].

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 [yahoo.com]; and have never recovered since.

AskJeeves Denounces Paid Inclusion.

[ron_ivi (607351)]

CNet's reporting that AskJeeves denounces paid inclusion [com.com]

" AskJeeves will stop accepting advertiser payments for inclusion in its searchable Web database, a move to draw competitive lines between it and Yahoo's new search engine."

Re:Didn't Yahoo learn the first time?

[petabyte (238821)]

Since you've gone and played with the wayback machine I thought I would to. Its interesting that google has gone the other way [archive.org] 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 ...

ODP

[by Anonymous Coward]

It's not perfect, but the Open Directory Project [dmoz.org] is a better Web directory. It powers the Google Directory as well.

This sounds wrong, but...

[l810c (551591)]

I'm not entirely against the idea of paying for placement if it's specified. We need a middle ground between completely free and expensive sponsored links. This might help filter Search Engine Spam, which is fast becoming a huge hassle and detriment to successful searching.

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.

I like Google's method

[Sycraft-fu (314770)]

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.

Search Engine Spam

[lewko (195646)]

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.

Contradiction?

[NotAnotherReboot (262125)]

For its commercial Web site owners, Yahoo unveiled a new "paid-inclusion" program called Site Match, which allows commercial Web sites to pay to be indexed and included in regular search results.

and...

The company says the paid listings will not rank higher in its results than they otherwise would.

So...unless I'm not getting this, they're making it sound as though advertisers pay for...nothing. Which clearly isn't correct

Re:Contradiction?

[univgeek (442857)]

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.

Re:Contradiction?

[mdfst13 (664665)]

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.

Re:Contradiction?

[wronskyMan (676763)]

From the SiteMatch trademark application:

Providing electronic navigation services via the internet, namely, providing search engine services for obtaining data on a wide variety of topics; tracking and analyzing the performance of online advertising for others; providing information, creating indexes of information, indexes of web sites and indexes of other information sources in connection with the Internet; providing information from searchable indexes and databases of information, including text, electronic documents, databases, graphic and audio visual information, by means of the Internet; providing editorial review, marketing consultation, site performance analysis and reports regarding the performance of client web sites

It is possible that the payment ensures that the commercial sites are regularly crawled every x days for example, which would be of assistance to online merchants who want their latest deals to appear on searches, instead of their page from a week ago. The trademark app also indicates the possibility of companies being able to get usability/statistics reports generated by the crawler for their sites.

Surprise!

[Herkum01 (592704)]

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.

Well gee

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is actually good

[prostoalex (308614)]

Well, there's always silver lining [techweb.com]. 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.

Among the organizations working with Yahoo! are National Public Radio, Northwestern University, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and the National Science Digital Library.

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 [itfacts.biz] fight for that top spot, search engine business needs competition.

Lack of innovation in search sector

[by Anonymous Coward]

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 [sharedid.com].

Credibility

[Sparky77 (633674)]

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 [google.com], not this [overture.com]. 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.

Never release bad news on a slow news day...

[LostCluster (625375)]

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.

Text of Article

[OverlordQ (264228)]

Yahoo to Charge for Guaranteeing a Spot on Its Index
By SAUL HANSELL

Published: March 2, 2004

ahoo said yesterday that it would start charging companies that want to ensure that their Web sites are included in its Web index from which research results are selected.

The practice, called "paid inclusion," has long been a part of many search engines including Microsoft's MSN search function and Ask Jeeves. But Google, which last year surged ahead of Yahoo to become the No. 1 site for searching on the Internet, disdains the practice as misleading.

Last month, Yahoo replaced Google, which had operated Yahoo's search engine, with its own technology to index billions of Web pages. Yahoo says it hopes to include every site on the Internet it can find in that index at no charge. But sites that pay for Yahoo's new program can guarantee that they are included in the index.

Advertisement

Yahoo will update its index of paying clients every two days, while it may update its listing of other sites once a month. And Yahoo will give paying clients detailed reports on when its users click on their sites and will help those sites improve their listings.

The paying sites will be intermingled with others in Yahoo's main search results listings, which are separate from the advertising called "sponsor results" on top of and to the side of Yahoo's 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. He pointed out that many companies hire firms that specialize in tweaking Web pages so that they rise in search rankings.

Yet executives at several of those firms say that paying to be included in search indexes often does help paying sites jump ahead of nonpaying sites: paying sites are allowed to submit additional information, in a so-called data feed, which helps the search engine associate their pages with a given topic.

"Almost without fail, any time we submit a feed, stuff that was nowhere to be found on a search engine pops up to the top," said Gord Hotchkiss, president of Enquiro, a search consulting firm.

Sites will pay from $10 to $49 for each Web page indexed and from 15 cents to $1 each time a Yahoo user clicks on a link to their sites.

Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, estimates that this paid-inclusion program will produce $100 million a year in revenue for Yahoo.

Mr. Cadogan said that the purpose of the program was simply to offer Yahoo users more relevant information. He added that Yahoo would give some nonprofit organizations like the Library of Congress the ability to add pages to its index without paying. (While Yahoo's paid inclusion program is available to any business that can enter a credit card number on its Web site, the nonprofit version will be open only to a select group of organizations.)

Yahoo says its program is in compliance with Federal Trade Commission guidelines on paid inclusion programs because the payments are disclosed to any user who clicks on the "what's this" link that appears on each search.

Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, argued that such disclosures were not enough. He compared search results with the news articles in newspapers or magazines, which are independent of advertising.

"Any time you accept money to influence the results, even if it is just for inclusion, it is probably a bad thing," Mr. Page said.

This is why Yahoo cannot beat Google

[teetam (584150)]

There is a fundamental difference in the approaches of these two companies.

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.

Re:This is why Yahoo cannot beat Google

[IntelliTubbie (29947)]

Google decides what to do, tries to do it very well and if possible, tries to make money of it ...Yahoo on the other hand, would gladly sacrifice excellence in their service, for money.

It's not that Yahoo is greedy and Google isn't, or even that Yahoo is greedier than Google. It's that Google is long term greedy whereas Yahoo is short term greedy. (Note that I'm using greedy in the non-pejorative sense here.)

Google wisely recognizes that it's sometimes better to build a quality product over time and then cash in than it is to trade quality, reputation, and higher future profits for a quick buck. Short term greed is a common affliction of public companies, like Yahoo, who have shareholders and analysts breathing down their necks every quarter for immediate results. Privately held Google has the luxury of taking their time ... although I wonder if this will change after the IPO.

Cheers,
IT

Paid listings are what ruined altavista

[MichaelCrawford (610140)]

AltaVista used to be a great search engine before they started taking paid listings.

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.

Re:Paid listings are what ruined altavista

[Sycraft-fu (314770)]

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.

building the better search engine

[TheSHAD0W (258774)]

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.

Google/NYTimes reg. bypass

[by Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo to Charge for Guaranteeing a Spot on Its Index [nytimes.com]

M$ will win this one

[superpulpsicle (533373)]

Yahoo search: gates
Result: Microsoft

Yahoo search: viagra
Result: Microsoft

Yahoo search: apple
Result: Microsoft

Yahoo search: linux
Result: Microsoft

Yahoo search: porn
Result: Microsoft

Yahoo search: penguin
Result: Microsoft

What a Shame

[dupper (470576)]

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.

bullshit on this!

[pair-a-noyd (594371)]

I'm fscking sick off all the gdmf commercial sites that float up like turds that won't flush.

When I enter HP Laserjet IIIsi I get 400,000 freaking sites peddling toner and ink refills but I have to dig through dozens of pages of bullshit to find tech info like parts lists or diagrams.

I wish they would implement a new switch or two in search engines,

HP Laserjet IIIsi -commercial -for profit +usefull

Wow! Paid results! Good-bye Google!

[rjamestaylor (117847)]

Yeah, right. Real heart warming, Yahoo.

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 ... 6 months? Maybe once a month prior to that?

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.

Won't make a difference

[Bill_Royle (639563)]

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 [vivisimo.com]. There's nothing better than clustered results!

The Seperation of Church and State in Media

[LostCluster (625375)]

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.

Slashdot, that pillar of journalism.

[X (1235)]

Okay, let's correct all the things the slashdot summary got wrong:

• Payments will not boost prominence. They will only increase the frequency of spidering. No impact on results ranking
• The data feed is essentially like meta-data in the web page: Yahoo's engine determines whether it's trustworthy or not.
• The for-profit and not-for-profit announcements are related, because they are both use the same technology to work.

What about "REFERRER" headers?

[whoever57 (658626)]

And Yahoo will give paying clients detailed reports on when its users click on their sites and will help those sites improve their listings.

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?

I think the free market will sort this out...

[Junior J. Junior III (192702)]

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?

I wasn't charged

[Long-EZ (755920)]

I made a couple of websites to test some web authoring software, and to help define a potential product I wanted to develop. I never submitted them to any search engines. Several months later, I started getting quite a bit of email inquiries, even though the website clearly stated that a product was not yet for sale. I quickly took the sites down to avoid advertising vaporware.

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 Rights Online???

[l0ungeb0y (442022)]

What I don't get is why this story is posted under "Your Rights Online"

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 ./ ed not thinking before pulling the trigger?

Re:Paid placement?

[Kilka (694154)]

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?

[Prof.Phreak (584152)]

The results of your query are the results of their algorithms only.

I'm guessing it's the same with Yahoo, except $$$ is part of the algorithm too.

Re:Paid placement?

[saden1 (581102)]

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.

Re:Paid placement?

[arkanes (521690)]

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.

Re:Paid placement?

[FlipmodePlaya (719010)]

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.

Re:Paid placement?

[geoffspear (692508)]

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.

Even better question....

[raehl (609729)]

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.

Re:Paid placement?

[X (1235)]

Google *does not* take money for higher placements. That's (partially why they are revered here on Slashdot. Google's ads are separate, off to the side, and clearly marked.

Congratulations, you have failed to read the article. Yahoo isn't taking money for higher placements either. Their ads are separate, at the top of the page, and clearly marked.

What Yahoo is taking money for is spidering a site more often. That's it. End of story.

Re:What could it hurt?

[0x0d0a (568518)]

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.