[Sigia-l] new Yahoo! search

[Listera]

"tom smith" wrote:

> That's it, I've gone from love to hate in 3 easy gripes...

So it didn't take you very long to discover the basic business proposition
behind Yahoo's new search scheme. :-) Let's listen to what Yahoo says:
 
"We are trying to integrate our content to make searches easier and faster
and smarter," said Jeff Weiner, the senior vice president at Yahoo's search
operation. "That really starts to change the game."
[...]
Mr. Weiner said the growing use of Google had changed the way people shop
online. For years, Yahoo and other shopping sites assumed users wanted to
click on various categories of merchandise to browse through available
products much as they comb through racks in a store.

"The way people shop has changed,'` he said. "Instead of browsing, people
are using search and typing what they want into a search box."

Yahoo Plans Improvements in Effort to Regain Lost Ground
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/07/technology/07YAHO.html>

So it's all about shopping. :-)

This should remind us of the TV model. A handful of networks dominate TV
viewing, just as Yahoo, Google and MSN pretty much dominate the vast
majority of searches on the web. On TV, programs are what's tolerated
between commercials. So now we have search results sandwiched between
shopping leads on the web. We can safely predict that the frequency and
intrusiveness of web ads on search sites to increase substantially, given
the pressures of the business model pursued here.

Will this work? Will we tolerate overt and covert commercial insinuation on
something as basic as search in what's supposed to be an interactive medium?
I don't know. The the ad-supported 'free' TV model has been very lucrative
for many decades, but has lost a huge chunk of its appeal and control in the
past few years. Do we have another choice? Unless someone else provides
ad-free search as good as Yahoo, we don't. The price of 'free' searches
seems to be more than banner ads. You decide which one's worse. :-)

Ziya
Nullius in Verba