The Digital Signage Insider

Apparently, Yahoo! has decided that switching its engine from Google to Inktomi (or possibly something entirely different) wasn't enough to stir up the search engine community. According to a number of differet sources, Yahoo plans to "guarantee" an organization's placement within Yahoo search results in exchange for monetary renumeration. Up until now, this type of arrangement was typically reserved for mafia outfits offering to provide "protection" to legitimate business owners. That comparison may be a bit harsh, but consider that Yahoo is now the only vendor to provide pay-for-placement in both its directory service as well as its search engine. On the other hand, though, provided that there is some kind of checks-and-balances algorithm in place to ensure that paid content isn't completely irrelevant to the search term, this could actually improve the quality of search results in some cases. Pay-for-clicks, after all, is the ultimate measure of a company's commitment to a particular search term. Right now, though, it's still a bit unclear as to whether Yahoo will allow for a pay-for-placement where organizations can pick and choose where they want to show up, or if the service will be a more basic pay-for-general-inclusion setup.