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Now, I don't believe this is a topic for the Yahoo! forum alone, because it is the principle, not the actual engine that is important.
What has brought this to a head is my recent re-reading of many of the old PageRank papers, and especially [www7.scu.edu.au...]
... we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
So, just why are Yahoo! directly referenced so heavily in the paper itself? Yahoo were completely advertiser driven, and thus, in the words of Brin and Page themselves, biased away from the needs of the consumer (and therefore away from relevance).
Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed.
I am guessing that Google's own income from Yahoo! might just be a 'bias' in judging how they could align the above statement with the fact that it seems Yahoo! is far, far more about money than about quality these days. Even so, I would dearly like to know whether Mr Brin and Mr Page would use Yahoo! as an example now, as they did back in 98.
Anyway, my main point is this:
Why do the PPC engines take so much criticism about being solely about money yet Yahoo seems to escape the same brush about relevance? Isn't there a level of hypocracy somewhere in all this?
When Yahoo first introduced Business Express, I was delighted. At last, they had found a form of income that they could and should have used to pay for more editing staff. That way, Business Express would have improved the quality of Yahoo, by allowing more staff to add more sites that were NOT directly submitted.
Naturally, that was a very naive hope and instead it has become even harder than it was 2 years ago to get any site listed in Yahoo via free submission, and I have never yet found eveidence of a site being added without being submitted in the last two years.
Lets face it, the only thing keeping Yahoo! going is Google. Google has preserved Yahoo in two ways, one by finally enabling Yahoo to make some decent results for searches, and second, by virtue of PageRank being the only reason that most of us truly value a Yahoo listing.
Without Google, I believe Yahoo! would have folded last year, at the latest. That only leaves the question, of whether it would have been better if they had folded.
So, any thoughts or discussion? Have Yahoo gotten away with the fact they are not a whit more unbiased than Overture?
Ammon Johns
"Have Yahoo gotten away with the fact they are not a whit more unbiased than Overture?"
Although Yahoo has and always will be an advertising based engine, I do think that they are definitely more unbiased than overture. In my experience they're "website" matches offer just as level of playing field as any other PFI search engine.
"Without Google, I believe Yahoo! would have folded last year, at the latest."
This is an intriguing subject. I could just as easily argue that by adopting Google, Yahoo has tied their own noose and hung it from a tree.
First off, Yahoo hasn't turned a profit in the last 6 quarters. Yet at the same time they're paying google millions of dollars for their serps when they could be using somebody like Ink, and be getting paid by Ink to use the serps.
Second, they've created their greatest competitior. When Yahoo first started using google, google was still the new kid on the block. Google users were tech savvy and most everyone else had no clue what google was. The amount of branding Yahoo provided Google with the "average joe" was priceless. I believe Yahoo's use of Google was the catalyst that caused the rapid rise of Google. (not that google wouldn't have risen eventually, but without Yahoo I believe the process would have been much slower). How many Yahoo users do you think have switched to Google? How many of those users found out about Google from using Yahoo?
