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One of the important link on Premium Search Page is the Privacy Link. Try to click on it.
Nothing free...
I tried out the two main keywords from two of my sites.
I'm absolutely number one in Google for both of these tests. But in this weird new Yahoo search, I don't even show up.
It looks to me like their ranking works like this:
1) PPC up front, no questions asked.
2) Major news sites
3) Forget everything else.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED!
Obviously the question becomes, is that all there is? Or is this prelude to something bigger? Is northern light ending public access at it's own site so that it can power Yahoo just as Inktomi did?
[help.yahoo.com...]
It does indeed appear to be a straight Northern Light affiliate deal. The list of documents available above suggests that it mostly covers sources that did not have the wherewithal or desire to run their own Websites. Northern Light probably picked up digitial reproduction rights to most of these for a song.
On the same page as this so-called "deep search" of "premium documents" you can also click on Yahoo "categories, Web sites, Web pages, and news." The Web sites are Yahoo directory listings, and the "categories" doesn't seem to be implemented yet (at least with the searches I tried). The Web pages are google.yahoo.com. The news is Yahoo News.
What's interesting to me (may be old news because I don't follow Yahoo) is that all the SERPs on their various searches all have the "look and feel" of a Google SERPs page. It's all integrated into a uniform experience.
When you subscribe to Yahoo, you apparently get an entire package. It seems likely that they're going after an approach in which individual subscribers will be an important part of their revenue stream. At the same time, they will continue to have a free-access directory, with PPC an important part of that stream. Of course you'll still probably get pop-unders and such, whether you are a subscriber or not.
(There's no way to stop the advertising by paying -- that seems to be true all over the Web. The Compuserve proprietary dial-up protocol (and I presume AOL is the same story) has really been shoving ads at their $19.95/month dial-up customers. You have to click away about four layers of ads when you log on, before you're switched over to a TCP/IP connection to the Internet. If you try to abort these layers prematurely, you get punished. Lately they've been popping up even at log-off.)
One question is whether Yahoo will be able to pull it off without Google's Web search results backing them up. I doubt that they'd even have the courage to try this, so I suspect they'll be with Google for some time to come.
I'm not as shocked by their premium search as I was two minutes after I tried it, having studied it more closely. It's obviously all that non-Web stuff that Northern Light has been doing for years. Except in rare, highly-specialized cases, I don't think it can be justifiably touted as a "deep search," if only because you can use Google to find similar or even better content that is on the Web, and that remains free.
If there's a threat at all to what Yahoo is doing, it seems to me that it's the impression they'll be able to convey that Yahoo is a one-stop portal to everything you need to access, on-Web or off, from your keyboard. Just subscribe for one low monthly rate.
If they start bundling this approach with OEMs who manufacture PCs (one free year of Yahoo!), then it might even work, since they already enjoy strong branding.
I don't like the model, but I guess it's better to have Yahoo competing with AOL and MS, than to have them doing nothing at all.
Try this search to do with the former President of Bosnia:
Top two links are to news events about his illness etc. last month. They are available for free at the BBC and other news sites, yet Yahoo/Northern Light is charging $2.95 for them!
What a rip off!
It's a service - if you like the product why not pay for it?
I said it before: I'm willing to subscribe to a good, ad-free personalizable search facilty.
I'd rather pay admission to a good library than be caught in a cheap shopping mall.
while in a better world of course all libraries should be free!
But back to Yahoo: No way that they stop throwing ads into Joe User's face. A free websearch heavily mixed with paid listings will remain.
I'd prefer Google providing the core to Y! websearch mainly for one reason:
It would perhaps delay the possibility of Google going for paid inclusion/listings.
-- Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador USA, 1999), p. 43.
It's a bit of a tease forsure, as some of the news content for example is available for free elsewhere, and sometimes more up to date. That is a bit confusing, but im sure Y! is doing it to increase the aize of the db and make sure you get at least some returns on obscure terms. From where I sit, the costs are fairly cheap for the user comparatively to traditional pay per article services like Lexis Nexis and ABI-Inform, mainly subscribed to by corporate, research and academic libraries. No doubt that will rise soon.
There is a place for pay per view content - info in obscure technical, scientific, business areas has to be paid for in some way or other.
Exactly - thanks for clarifying this, Chiyo. That's what I had in mind when talking about stuff not easily available on the net.
>There is a place for pay per view content
Yep. One might ask though if the author gets a share of the payment.
Forget about recoprical linking to improve your page ranking. You'll have no chance against the High and Mighty: Yahoo Web site -> advertise on NBC television > NBC advertise one of its movies on Yahoo portal etc. etc.
Hope you paid Ms. Klein to post an excerpt from her book by the way.
Joking! :)
Nope the author usually dosent get anything, but the publisher gets their cut.
The concern was that the Web would harm the "middle-man" publishers.. seeing that all academic journals are just a way to get peer reviews and read what other people are researching in a small area. I know one large UP that boasts that nobody actually "reads" their journals. Why not set up a private Website where researchers can just share their latest research/articles (with peer reviewing inbuilt)?
Still that threat has not really come to pass. Yahoo's prices of a few bucks are far below traditional pay per article costs - that is what is confusing me at the moment...
If I have written a great article on SEO or compiled a fantastic glossary of online marketing terms and made it availabe for free, how would I feel if Yahoo! charged $4.99 for people to view it? The source of the article and how it was obtained will be very important.
1) Have they obtained all the digital rights to articles that they display?
And / or
2) Will they get by, by motivating that it is simply a premium search service that they provide and that people pay for?
and..
3) Will the reasonable searcher perceive this to be an archive of content that he / she has rights to view it and show it to others after making payment?
and and and....
Intellectual property law and specifically the law pertaining to content and the web is defining itself. How do all of you see it panning out?
The deal was made last summer:
[library.northernlight.com...]
hehe. The document will cost you $1 to read.
[northernlight.com...]
Think about it for a moment: Northern Light has offered this "service" since I can remember. They, however, have a more sophisticated audience than Yahoo. Where do people like my mother -- the penultimate consumer -- go to search? Not Google. Not even Northern Light. They go to Yahoo.
Those are the people who would not find the information for free elsewhere on the web.
Note that Yahoo is offering exactly what NL is, even in the same order.
Try this search for Izetbegovic on Northern Light's Special Collection [northernlight.com] and then the same search on Yahoo's Premium Search [premium.search.yahoo.com].
Predictably, Yahoo has decided that the king's ransom they are charging submitters isn't enough. They are going to get paid on the other end as well! (I actually predicted this more than a year ago in the ODP forum.)
The publisher would most likely get a cut of the pay per view fee, or maybe even a barter promotion deal if not.
Almost 100% sure that they don't include copyright content like yours or mine from being listed there unless they have come to an agreement with the publisher of such content - whether that be you or your publisher or whoever owns the copyright to your content.
Thats what I would expect.
If this is the case, the model can work and has worked for research houses which specialise in collecting QUALITY data!
At the mo, 90% of the articles on offer are available elsewhere or not that valuable in terms of information - certainly not worth much!
1.2 Northern Light Obligations. Subject to full payment, Northern Light will operate, maintain, and support any and all functions, protocols, methodologies, and processes necessary to serve Documents to Authorized User. Authorized User acknowledges that the Service may be subject to temporary interruptions due to causes beyond Northern Light's reasonable control, technical difficulties or delays, reliance on third parties, equipment suppliers and/or delays caused by Authorized User or any other entity. Northern Light may include or delete, at its sole discretion at any time, any Documents or any other content included in the Service.
