[Sigia-l] new Yahoo! search

[Simon Wistow]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 08:06:17PM -0400, Boniface Lau said:
> ISTM, Google acknowledges the fact that people go to Google not for
> clicking on ads. Thus, Google places the ads to the side. In contrast,
> Yahoo!'s sandwiching of the search result with sponsor results is
> in-your-face and therefore off-putting.


http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=amazon

*cough* [0]

http://www.google.com/search?q=amazon

Bizarrely this is the same, just a different colour. I include it for 
completeness.

The odd thing is that having seen metrics and usability reports from 
working at a completely different search engine (I'm not allowed to 
comment on the one that I currently work for) is that people *like* 
clicking on sponsored links. Perhaps this is an accident of placement or 
just because people are fooled but the links tend to be highly relevant 
to what the person is searching for. I'm guessing that this is because 
if people pay quite a lot of money for a sponsored match then they'd 
want it to be relevant to the terms it's attached to so that they get 
the best bangs for bucks.

Simon
[who's now skirting limits of NDAs and will stop now]


[0] Obviously they look different and yes, you might say that 
highlighting in a different colour is good, yada yada yada but my point 
is that Google do a similar thing too. Obviously, in the end, nobody 
forces you to use any particular search engine though and it is entirely 
your choice. The Yahoo! Attitude Readjuster team have been alerted to 
your presence though <grin>