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

[Michal Migurski]

>> Yahoo can "spider aggressively," they don't have to extract money for
>> it. Is the result set OK when a privileged few can afford to pay to be
>> included in the first place? Google and AskJeeves, among others, don't
>> think so.
>
>If no one links to a page, the spider can't find it. Pay-for-inclusion
>helps unlinked pages be found. Should only the privileged few who are "in
>the know" get invited to the party? google has come under fire for that.
>http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/29/google_watch/print.html
>http://www.sitepoint.com/article/999

That's not entirely accurate - every search engine has a page like this
one, specifically for that reason: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Google's historically-great search results are a direct and intentional
result of their reliance on linkage to determine relevancy. If a webmaster
can't get anyone to link to their site, that doesn't sound like google's
problem to me - it sounds like a communication and publicity problem.
Complaining that they're not part of the "in crowd" and blaming the system
is (to me) usually a symptom of a lack of desire to do the simple legwork
it takes to tell people about creative or commercial output, and I'd
hardly call the set of linked websites a privileged few.

Then again, in a market economy there will always be some enterprising
go-getter out there willing to trade money for legwork, and in this case
it's Yahoo.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
michal migurski- contact info and pgp key:
sf/ca            http://mike.teczno.com/contact.html