Scott Hendison had a great blog post that you should check out regarding a new “advertising” method that Yahoo! has announced. Scott even has screen shots of a search to showcase this new layout. I am waiting on a call back from my contact over at Yahoo! for clarification which will probably be “no comment” … or “I wasn’t aware of that, let me get back to you.”
In any event, I have been saying for a long time that Yahoo! has been making decisions and organizational moves that signal the end of organic search. The word I hear is that Inktomi is so dated and they aren’t willing to invest to improve it. It just makes sense as their organic results get single digit click throughs in terms of market share.
They just need to switch to a complete paid model and bring back the directory results as their “organic results”. So, you have PPC ads at the top, local results and then directory results. That model is perfect and makes sense. Why isn’t Yahoo! doing it?
Scott Hendison says
Apparently, Google is engaging in this same sort of thing, to a degree.
Rand Fishkin commented on my blog that if you search for “Seattle to Boston” it brings up a top line in an “unmarked as sponsored” environment.
I don’t think it quite the same thing, since it’s inside of a sort of “one box” and using different font, it’s easily identified. But clearly it is NOT marked sponsored and that’s a disturbing trend…