Published in Search Engines on Monday, March 8th, 2004
This year was supposed to be a very big year in the world of search, with Yahoo! and Microsoft launching new search engine services. As we all know, MS backed off, but Yahoo! has launched full scale.
While Yahoo!s new search service was pleasing many people, it's new paid inclusion service, which they call "CAP", for Content Acquisition Program, was ruffling a lot of feathers.
In reality, descriptions of the program seem to fit it's name quite well, though some people had some fun with it all, as seen in this piece by Tim Bray, who provided this translation of this article at Search Engine Watch by Chris Sherman.
To help people along, WebmasterWorld member (and Yahoo! employee) “Tim” answers SEM concerns with regards to Yahoo!s new program in More Answers to Members Question from Yahoo!.
It seems Google will be changing the user agent name of that hardworking Googlebot. Again from WebmasterWorld, Googlguy lets us in on New Googlebot User Agent Identification.
Keep your eyes open for the following:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Here is the old user agent string for reference:
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
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Comments and Feedback
If my experience with Yahoo! Japan is anything, Tim Bray's translations is spot on. 150.000 yen (about 1500USD) buys a place. Want better ? “unas monedas por favor”, the beggars in the streets of Barcelona used to say.......
And as an aside, Yahoo Japan, which has always used Inktomi, still uses the keywords meta tag. Not sure yet what Yahoo US has taken from Inktomi.
Wow, that's big bucks Philippe. Are you sure you aren't thinking about the charge for a directory listing?
Well, yes, but without it, you're nowhere near page3 in the listings, except for some more obscure keywords. The thing is, it sounds like big money untill you check the reach. 150.000 yen buy you at best a cheaply made leaflet that can be distributed in a medium size city (500.000 to 1.000.000 people). Yahoo reaches the whole world of course.
On the other side, there are strong suspicions that search results are unfairly balanced towards some, who pay more to Yahoo.