Umbra - 3:45 pm on Nov 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

In regards to JoeT321’s question, “Do you guys have any plans to be able to turn off search network partners like Google does?” we are seriously considering such a feature but at the time I can’t comment further. Believe me I’ve told the product teams how folks on the boards have been asking for such a feature.

I'm shocked this wasn't done months ago. I tried to compensate by adding all those garbage search partners to our "blocked domains" list. Then I realized that, due to the sheer volume of crappy search partners, it was simply a waste of my time constantly updating the blocked domains list. So I stopped renewing the credit on the account. If Yahoo can't be bothered to fix this glaring deficiency, then I can't be bothered to advertise with them.

Even if you do want to put yourself through this process of updating blocked domains, there is, ridiculously, a cap of 250 sites. So once you've logged 251 useless search partners, you're at the end of the line.

My guess, however uninformed, is that if Yahoo allows merchants to filter out the search partners, then what's left is a very tiny number of daily clicks (at least relative to Adwords) and then merchants may wonder if it's worth their time managing their account for such a small volume.

To be fair, though, Google has its own issues [webmasterworld.com] with separating search partners, but it's not anywhere near as bad as Yahoo's.