August 02, 2005
An Info Pro's View on Yahoo Search Subscriptions
In "Searching More of the Opaque Web" Mary Ellen Bates provides an excellent overview of the relative merits of Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, Yahoo's new (and still fairly modest) service selling low-cost journal and news articles from a small group of sources such as Consumer Reports, New England Journal of Medicine, Wall Street Journal, Lexis-Nexis and Factiva.
Bates reminds us that the service doesn't allow for comprehensive coverage: it only allows searching of a subset of each journal/service's full text content, and the focus is on recent items.
July 13, 2005
Want a glimpse into the search future? Google Labs and Yahoo Next
Want to see what's new on the (commercial) search horizon? Try the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time search offerings of the major engines, like Google Labs and Yahoo Next.
One tip: If you're like me and you want to try to get a glimpse of trends, try to look for similarities between the offerings of these two hot competitors. Right now I'm seeing pointers to a differentiation of two types of Internet -- one for "serious" research-oriented questions (although I'm curious to see how either of these behemoths defines "research") and another for shopping.
We already see some of that differentiation with Google Scholar, Google Print, Yahoo Mindset and Yahoo Subscriptions. Each of these alleged "testbeds" offer searchers access to more highly differentiated content than would be available in straight-up Google or Yahoo.
Why separate research and shopping, and what will this do for engine revenues? These new spinoffs offer a great untapped market for paid consumer-level content, as well as context-sensitive ads. The big engines are clearly betting that serious searchers are ready to pay, if only to satisfy their need for quality information that they can't find in a sea of search engine spam.
By separating research (i.e. pay-per-view, with a few free tidbits thrown in, like content from .edu sites) from shopping (i.e. everything else), the search engines can return to more traditional relevancy algorithms. Remember relevancy conditions like link analysis, proximity of terms, frequency of term occurance, and currency of information? In an shopping-free engine, those conditions can be re-introduced, leaving the optimizers to focus their beat-the-engine techniques on the shopping side of search.