Anyone who searches regularly for articles and documents on subscription websites knows the problem: you can only search them one at a time because their content does not appear in normal web searches. Yahoo thinks it has the solution in what it calls its Search Subscriptions service, which allows users to search up to seven closed sites, as well as combine subscription searches with ordinary web searches.
This is known as ”deep search”, because it goes beyond the surface level of what is openly available on the web, and provides access to what may be larger and more detailed silos of information.
The advantage of using YSS is that you don’t have to perform the same search multiple times on different ”deep” sites. The catch is that you have to be a subscriber to view any of the results, though in some cases you will be able to pay per view.
Yahoo is offering a beta service that searches FT.com, The Street.com, Forrester Research and The Wall Street Journal, among others. Factiva and LexisNexis, the big news and data search rivals, will be added in the coming months. Yahoo says the main benefit to the owners of these sites is exposure to its 320-million users, some of whom may decide to subscribe.
Yahoo does not charge publishers to be listed, or take a percentage from new subscriptions or one-off article sales made via the service. It also says it has no firm idea how many UK or Europe subscription sites are under consideration for its service, but it is accepting nominations from users.
Salim Meta, director of Yahoo Search UK and Ireland, says the development of the service depends on feedback. ”We don’t know where this will go yet. If it is popular with users and publishers, the listing of sites will increase,” he says. ”We are the first to do this, so it is very much in beta [test] at the moment. The one thing users have said is that they like being able to mix the results of searching on a subscriber site with searching the web.”
Yahoo says the service targets all its users, not just those who are likely to pay for content in this manner. However, in the US, there are signs it is trying to make itself more attractive to small businesses, with an offer of free web hosting that has not been replicated in the UK.
Simon Alterman, Factiva’s vice president of content, says there are many benefits to being listed: ”It offers convenience to Yahoo users and we are recognising there is valuable information not easily accessible to most web searchers that we want to make available.”
Factiva is to provide a selection of its sources through the Yahoo page and will offer pay-as-you-go access at about $1,80 (R12) per article, or $12 (R78) for 10 articles.
Google, which along with various news aggregators promotes the free searching of open access news on the web as well as offering search of academic papers through its Google Scholar service, said it welcomed competition in areas of niche search.
But most in the search community seem unsurprised by Yahoo’s announcement. According to Allen Weiner, a Gartner analyst, Yahoo’s move into broader search was expected: ”The other shoe has dropped in the search marketplace. We have long expected the addition of premium content or content not available through web crawling. Yahoo’s announcement sets the stage for the next step in the evolution in web search.”
The trend began earlier this year when Yahoo and Google introduced search of premium non-web content in the area of audio and video search. However, Gartner says it remains to be proven how they will make money.
Search engine Ask Jeeves says there is most demand from users to make search more targeted through services such as its ”related search”, which helps users narrow down searches stage by stage. ”We are also working on the idea of searching the deep web,” says Tony Macklin, vice president European product development. ”We are looking to develop relationships with publishers of content held on databases.”
But Blinkx, a newer entrant to the search market, says Yahoo has the wrong focus. Its founder, Suranga Chandratillake, says: ”Indexing the deep web is limited as it is restricted to only those who have already subscribed. There is much more of a demand for deep search of audio and video. We are the only search service that checks the quality of audio and video before it is presented as a search result. This is deep search of content we all have access to.”
Gartner believes the service represents a broader trend towards what it calls ”universal search”, where a user is able to search across the web, the desktop, a home or work network, and selected subscription services simultaneously.
Meanwhile, Google’s recent admission that it is developing an online payment service similar to eBay’s PayPal could be the springboard for its own paid-for content services. Cynics may be amused to note that the Yahoo Search Subscriptions link does not appear on a Google search, which is strange bearing in mind how many news sites and blogs link to it. – Guardian Unlimited Â