[Sigia-l] "Best Bets" the Yahoo way

[Peter VanDijck]

> Yahoo cannot ask for money to increase someone's chances of getting into the
> results set and then turn around and claim the payment has no affect on
> relevancy. 

Yes they can. They cannot claim that the payment has no effect on the
result set (it has). But they can claim that payment has no effect on
relevancy (it hasn't). (I'm defining relevancy as the ordering of
results within the result set, related to the query. Correct me if I'm
wrong.)

Anyways, I do see real 2 issues with this approach. 

One is the completeness of the result set. As long as Yahoo keeps up and
increases its efforts to spider aggresively, the result set will be ok.
But that also means that the value of paid inclusion is limited. (It's
very easy to get a new site into Google within weeks or even days). 

The second is not about the relevancy of the search results (I believe
them when they say it's not affected), but about trust. The article in
the NY Times was misleading (in my opinion), but things like that shape
trust. It will be for Yahoo to figure out if the additional revenue is
worth the reduced trust the brand takes by articles like this.

Cheers,
Peter