TechSmec.com

Yahoo! Search Subscriptions - An Old Dog, No New Tricks

June 18th, 2005

The most underwhelming announcement of the week must have been Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, a new service from the internet giant which it claims allows the user to search previously restricted, subscription-only content from websites such as the Wall Street Journal.

The Yahoo! PR department must really have been struggling for something to talk about this week because Yahoo! Search Subscriptions is neither newsworthy, nor particularly useful.

For a start, Google has been indexing subscription-only content for a long time. TechSmec.com has been involved in some subscription-based sites in the past and Google have always worked closely to ensure that the content is still spidered, usually by allowing the IP of the Google spider to bypass the login stage. Google also encourages the owner of the site to make the results of the search free to view, even though clicking onto another story, or even the next page of the same story, will bring up a login box.

Yahoo!’s offering is restricted to just a few sites and as far as we could tell, it was necessary to subscribe before seeing the content. The quality of search results from Yahoo! (and Google to be fair) has been declining for years, so you won’t find us shelling out for something that might be totally irrelevant. If you’re already a subscriber, to the WSJ say, you won’t use Yahoo! to search the site, you’ll use the built in search engine.

All-in-all, Yahoo! Search subscriptions breaks no new ground, in fact the ground it retreads was never particularly great in the first place.

Entry Filed under: Misc / Humour