PDA

View Full Version : Yahoo! Shopping altering relevancy of search results


Nacho
06-26-2004, 03:34 PM
I’ve seen examples like this very often for a long time now:

http://www.ihispanic.com/sewf/yahoo-shopping1.gif

Where Yahoo! tries to increase the relevancy of their search by showing an image and pointing their users to their Shopping network. I think that’s a great idea, however, just recently I have started to notice the format shown above is dropped and replaced by showing “shopping.yahoo.com” results in the Sponsored section of the web matched results:

http://www.ihispanic.com/sewf/yahoo-shopping2.gif

What I don’t understand is, there is large conflict of interest existing in this type of Yahoo! strategy, where they are actually competing against both a long term customer of Yahoo! Stores (in our case) and also a long term customer of Overture. In fact, it’s a bit disappointing. I thought we are supposed to work together into bringing each other more business :confused:

I say, "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". The older strategy is not really creating any conflict. Keep in mind that when a user goes over to the Yahoo! Shopping network, participating merchants must now pay a PPC fee to have products enrolled according to the changes of their NEW program (https://productsubmit.adcentral.yahoo.com/sspi/us/index2).

Has anyone else seen the same? What do you think? Will this be part of Yahoo's long term strategy - to compete with their own customers? I'm hoping these are just some tests that will be dropped and not part of their long term plans.

seobook
06-26-2004, 04:21 PM
I think it is similar to (perhaps the exact same as) Google putting Froogle ads in their AdWords, which did not thrill too many people.

if you ask me it is dumb that they didn't learn from Google's recent mistake.