Yahoo! betas new subscription search pages

Posted on 17 Jun 2005 at 10:51

Internet portal Yahoo! has extended the reach of its search technology behind the firewalls of some of the world's biggest subscription sites. The new beta service Yahoo! Search Subscriptions will integrate results of a keyword search with content from these sites alongside normal 'free' results.

However, before anyone thinks that this is a sneaky way not to sign up to the likes of the FT or Forrester Research, you have to have a subscription and sign in before you are allowed to view the content. How the password protection works depends on the subscription site. Some will provide a summary of the content before moving you to a login page while others take you straight to the login.

Searchers have two ways of accessing content. They can choose to search only the subscription sites or they can choose to integrate the subscription searches with standard results. However, in the latter case the subscription content is grouped together at the top of the standard search result pages.

At present there are seven, mostly US, sites which are part of Search Subscriptions. The group includes Consumer Reports, Forrester Research, FT.com, IEEE, the New England Journal of Medicine, TheStreet.com and the Wall Street Journal. Yahoo! says that it plans to expand the range of searchable subscription content sources. The company promises that it will soon also include ACM, Factiva and Lexis-Nexis in the near future.

For Yahoo! it is an extra service that it can offer to its users. For the subscription-based sites the service could be invaluable. The most popular way to find information on the Internet is a search engine but if a company hides its content behind a subscription gateway, the world never knows its there. The Yahoo! Subscription Service not only gives subscribers to valuable content - and if they can afford to subscribe to these premium service they must be worth advertising to - they also provide a window where the sites themselves not only get a shop window for their content, they end up at the top of the SERPs.

That's got to be worth something.

In a separate announcement, Yahoo! is to buy US VoIP company Dialpad for an undisclosed sum. The move is seen as positioning the portal to become a serious player in Voice over IP technology that will probably be integrated with its Yahoo! Messenger product.

Author: Steve Malone