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

[Listera]

"Peter VanDijck" wrote:

>> 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).

Is Yahoo claiming it has no effect? I didn't see that. Otherwise, what are
their salespeople selling? If my payment is not going to have any effect on
the result set, why would I pay?

> But they can claim that payment has no effect on relevancy (it hasn't).

Wow. If you are not even included in the result set (because you haven't
"paid to be indexed in a timely manner") the relevancy you get is *zero.*
 
> 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.

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.

> But that also means that the value of paid inclusion is limited.

Precisely my point (that you didn't quote). Yahoo is deceiving either its
paid customers or the user, or both.
 
> It will be for Yahoo to figure out if the additional revenue is
> worth the reduced trust the brand takes by articles like this.

Absolutely. In the end Yahoo may have sold its brand cachet in search for
(what's reported to be) $100 million. It's possible to merchandize yourself
to irrelevancy. Remember Go? :-)

Ziya
Nullius in Verba