All The Talk About Yahoo's Paid Listings

Overhype

from the is-it-that-big-of-a-deal? dept

There seems to be lots of outrage going around about Yahoo’s announcements concerning paid inclusion for their latest search. First off, this isn’t particularly new or surprising. Yahoo has been doing paid inclusion for years. While there is always some concern about paid inclusion being seen as a “shakedown” to get content included in a search engine, Yahoo isn’t exactly in a position to toss up bad results on a consistent basis. If the results they’re giving aren’t very good, then people will stop using them, and will use Google or some other search engine. The more interesting thing about this announcement is that Yahoo is trying to focus on getting so-called “darknet” content (content that isn’t usually found by search engines) into their system this way, by encouraging companies to tell them where to search. While it makes sense to have some concerns about how paid inclusion is being used, if the results really aren’t that good, doesn’t that solve the issue by itself?