April 2004

Yahoo! Search update

Last month we told you about the new Yahoo! Search engine. Since then, things have moved along and now there is a lot more to tell. Firstly, you can submit to Yahoo! Search for free, although you do need to register first. Click here for the link.

Chances are the Yahoo! Search spider will eventually find your website through links anyway, but we still don’t know how long it will take for your website to be indexed by the spider with a free submission.

Paid submissions are via Overture Site Match (see Position Tech for more details.) You pay a flat annual fee for inclusion ($49 for the first URL) then every time someone clicks on your link, either $0.15, or $0.30 depending on the category your website falls under. This could work out very expensive, particularly for those marketing their website on a small budget. You would probably be better off with a straight Overture pay per click campaign, as then you can at least set a budget.

AlltheWeb's search results are now powered by Yahoo! Search, and the same for AltaVista. Yahoo! Search is therefore providing search results on the following major search engines: Yahoo!, AlltheWeb, AltaVista & MSN. Hotbot search is provided by Inktomi, although this will probably change to Yahoo! Search, and Lycos was powered by FAST, so this also may change to Yahoo! Search. The major search engines which have been unaffected by these changes are Google, and those search results fed by Google, and Ask Jeeves / Teoma.

If you're looking for varied search results, your options are now becoming very limited. It looks like Yahoo! is moving towards a monopoly - 2004 is already proving to be an interesting year in the world of online search.