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Yahoo Move Rekindles Pay-for-Inclusion Debate
Teh Washington Post Sunday, March 7, 2004; Page F06
Yahoo touched off furor Monday when it launched phase two of a Web-search makeover it began to catch up with its old partner, Google. For nearly four years, Google had provided the basic results people saw when they ran Web searches at Yahoo, but Yahoo dumped Google last month in favor of its own Web index (search.yahoo.com). Yahoo would say only that its new index contains "several billion" pages; Google (www.google.com) recently expanded its own index to 4.2 billion pages. It followed that move last week by inviting Web sites to fork over cash to guarantee their pages will get indexed by Yahoo's Web-crawling software; the search engine says this will improve the overall relevancy of its results. That's when rival sites began hollering that Yahoo's program could taint search results that should be set purely by mathematical formulas. Google, for example, does not allow advertisers to pay to be included in its Web index; the ads it does sell, like others at Yahoo, are displayed separately from the regular results. Tim Cadogan, a Yahoo vice president, insisted the site would not allow its pay-for-inclusion system to influence regular search results. The goal of the new program, he said, is to help Yahoo find more content it might otherwise not index because it is hidden inside Web databases and other hard-to-reach places. "This is not a pay-for-performance product, where you can influence your site's ranking," Cadogan said. "Your economic relationship [with Yahoo] will have no bearing on your placement in the results." Yahoo offers two price plans for inclusion, starting at $49 for small Web sites, plus a fee of 15 cents to 30 cents each time someone clicks on the site's listing. Larger Web sites pay more. Yahoo is also reaching out to large nonprofit sites, such as the Library of Congress, National Public Radio and Project Gutenberg, to index their massive databases for free. While Yahoo's ranking formulas don't take payments into account when they rank results, paid inclusion can still indirectly influence results by giving Yahoo more information about a site than it otherwise would have. That was one reason Ask Jeeves Inc. (www.ask.com) recently dropped its version of paid inclusion. Ask Jeeves product manager Jim Lanzone said the site couldn't figure out how to make fair comparisons of pages crawled in the regular way with those from large, dynamic databases that paid to submit extra information about themselves. Like Yahoo, Verizon Communications is girding for battle with Google. Verizon revamped its SuperPages site last week to present a less cluttered home page. It now collects more information from listed businesses -- mostly taken from Verizon's printed business directories, but also firms that pay to submit their listings through Verizon's new paid-inclusion program -- and displays it in an easier-to-read format. But looking up a business's phone number still requires a click past its first listing. America Online's ICQ instant-messaging servicejoined the online social-networking frenzy Thursday, launching a free "ICQ Universe" site on which users can post their own profiles, then link together groups of contacts. Its standout feature: a "presence" indicator that shows if a contact is online with ICQ's chat software.
E-mail Leslie Walker at walkerl@washpost.com.
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