Yahoo starts to charge for inclusion in its search rankings

Surprise, surprise… NYT story reads in part:

“March 2, 2004: Yahoo said yesterday that it would start charging companies that want to ensure that their Web sites are included in its Web index from which research results are selected.

The practice, called “paid inclusion,” has long been a part of many search engines including Microsoft’s MSN search function and Ask Jeeves. But Google, which last year surged ahead of Yahoo to become the No. 1 site for searching on the Internet, disdains the practice as misleading.

Last month, Yahoo replaced Google, which had operated Yahoo’s search engine, with its own technology to index billions of Web pages. Yahoo says it hopes to include every site on the Internet it can find in that index at no charge. But sites that pay for Yahoo’s new program can guarantee that they are included in the index.

Yahoo will update its index of paying clients every two days, while it may update its listing of other sites once a month. And Yahoo will give paying clients detailed reports on when its users click on their sites and will help those sites improve their listings.”

Hmmm… The day will come when Internet users will pay a fee to use a ‘clean’ search engine.