economics? Is that really the question here? ( was RE: [Sigia-l] Re: "Best Bets" the Yahoo way)

[David Heller]

Anytime you add an economic component to your aggregation methods you are
affecting the end result of the product. No matter what anyone says it will
have either an intended or unintended result in the long term, if on no
other level than the perceptual.

I think that people are asking the wrong question; sorry Christina, but I
think that Yahoo missed the direction here.

Why is Yahoo failing compared to Google ... Simplicity of message.
Google is about search and aggregation and nothing more and they have done a
really good job of separating search and aggregation into very disparate
components so in the end a user goes to google.com and is not inundated with
a million other links. Type string, get results, AND this is the key part
display the results in a way that is meaningful and useful and decipherable.
The "advertising" for the most part (except the banner) is relevant to my
search and does not get in the way. Yes, he who is at the top of the list
wins, for sure ... But that is less Google's problem than the sites that
Google searches for.

I think that if we take this isolated policy change too far we aren't giving
Yahoo enough credit here; but I'm going to continue the trend anyway b/c if
this policy is indeed done in a vaccuum w/o other big changes it says a lot
about the lack of attention to user-needs that is being expressed here and
that issue is important to all of us.

I use google for one reason over Yahoo ... It worked for me the first time I
used, the 2nd time, the 3rd time, the 4th time, etc. I've never had a reason
to look elsewhere and I don't imagine I will. THAT is hard to beat. Even if
Yahoo did everything exactly the same as Google, I still won't use it. Why
change? Yahoo has to do BETTER! And it has to get that message out there.
This policy is not an example of better; just more profitable. So while they
are helping (maybe) site owners, they are not helping end-users so they will
not increase their page views and thus not increase their revenues.

Things that can help search right now to help Yahoo...
E-mail me at dh at htmhell.com or send your first installment payment for my
consulting fees to blah blah blah. ;)

-- dave