
Thoughts on Yahoo BOSS Monetization (from Duck Duck Go Founder) - epi0Bauqu
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/02/thoughts-on-yahoo-boss-monetization-announcement.html
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pclark
great post. Where _are_ the competitors in this market? Could duckduckgo have
been made with Google tools?

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epi0Bauqu
Not under their current terms because Google won't let you change the look,
content, or order of the results, or let you omit some--all of which I am
doing with Yahoo's feed.

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thorax
We use our own optimized BOSS results as a feature over on <http://bug.gd> \--
and I couldn't agree more with every single one of the points in Gabriel's
post.

Yes, it's different.

No, it's not the end of the world for major/medium sites. For our site (and
likely DuckDuckGo), the added SLA will be a (perceived) risk softener.

Yes, Yahoo is letting down its new "open" developer community by changing the
revenue plans from passive to actively invoicing.

It could be worse-- they could be putting the changes into place sooner. But I
think a lot of developers were expecting the passive plan, so offering both
options would be better.

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d13hard
monetizing BOSS is a decent idea in theory, but its clear they should have
telegraphed this earlier in the program

the real issue here is that this will not and cannot reverse an obvious issue
with ysearch - it continues to underperform google in use, revenue, and
quality. selling ysearch to msft to me is a no-brainer, the costs for running
this service are astronomical, the ad system (panama) is a perennial
underperformer, and frankly search is not critical to yahoo's bread and butter
businesses...banner ads on key properties like news, sports, finance, mail,
and groups.

ysearch has never really made financial sense for the company, i suspect bartz
will not be religious about making futile frontal assaults on google like
jerry was

