Yahoo is now Inktomi

Just wanted to let everyone know that Yahoo is using all Inktomi resuts now!

Well, i was a little to fast. It looks like Yahoo is having its own engine built on Inktomi's system. This also means that you will have to pay an additional PFI fee to get into Yahoo from the regular Inktomi fee. This is suppose to start April 15th.

Inktomi charges fees to give out your URL on a search?

There is a PFI fee for being included in Inktomi. Everyone thought that you would then be included in Yahoo because Yahoo owns Inktomi and therefore thought that Yahoo would have nothing but Inktomi listings. But now Yahoo is going to soon also make you PFI to have a guaranteed listing. They still have a spider that can find your site and get you listed, but if you want is guaranteed your going to have to pay.

There will be more updates to this in the next few weeks, I am sure.

So basically, if somebody comes along and pays Yahoo a bunch of cash, they'll get priority placement actually in the rankings in "Web Results"?

Payment won't simply place them in "Sponsor Results"?

The sponsored results come from Overture which is pay-per-click. Pay-For-Inclusion through Yahoo does not mean your going to get at the top of the page. It means your subscribed pages are guaranteed to be in their index in less than like 72 hours. You still have to optimize your pages to get best positioning. Yahoo's spider might find your site too, which would be free, but it could take forever.

This is like sorta like MSN. All MSN web results use to be Looksmart and then secondary were Inktomi. Now MSN's web results are all Inktomi results. This is why you have to pay Inktomi (positiontech.com) to be listed in MSN's web results.

Oh, ok, so basically, paying just makes sure you get in the index within a set period of time as opposed to eventually/never?

I know for a fact Yahoo was charging for 'priority URL additions'(1) in '97.

(1) Guaranteeing your URL would be added promptly, rather than in several months.

Right, but just additions, not listings... That's cool then, cuz I know Yahoo/Inktomi knows about most of the pages on my site... Inktomi uses about 1.3gig/mo of my bandwidth (as opposed to Google's ~300Meg).

That's pretty irregular --- most posters here are pulling in people referred by Google, but its pretty cool you get so much traffic from Inktomi

Well, I did a search for my site's specific title and it is in there, it came up first...

If you search for "World's largest snake" on Google (just as one example), it has me on the first page right above CNN. If I do the same search on Yahoo now, I'm several pages away, so there is definitely a big difference...

It looks like the web community is going to start being split... The question each webmaster must face, who exactly are you going to optimize for now? Google or Inktomi? Like I said, their search results seem VERY different to each other.

Personally, I'm sticking with Google. Even when Google & Yahoo were using the same database, I got like 8-12 times as many referrals from Google searches than I did from Yahoo searches in any given month - even though the results were identical (except for Yahoo's sponsor links at the top & bottom of the page).

"It looks like the web community is going to start being split... The question each webmaster must face, who exactly are you going to optimize for now? Google or Inktomi? Like I said, their search results seem VERY different to each other."

Thats the way it use to be in the beginning. But if your content is good, you should be listed very well in both. Almost all my clients are ranked high in both and I am just optimizing each client for good content. One difference, with Inktomi, they take in consideration of your description tag, which Google does not, not much anyway.

"Personally, I'm sticking with Google. Even when Google & Yahoo were using the same database, I got like 8-12 times as many referrals from Google searches than I did from Yahoo searches in any given month - even though the results were identical (except for Yahoo's sponsor links at the top & bottom of the page)."

I think thats the way with everyone because Google is used to search more than any other engine.

You may not be ranking high in Yahoo yet because I am sure they are still tweaking the algo. If your in a rush to get listed, I would recommend optimizing as you usually do, get an Inktomi subscription and when Yahoo changes on April 15th, get a subscription for them too.

This is just my opinion, but it worked for me.

Naah, I'm just gonna keep optimizing for Google, and if Inktomi rates me highly too, then great, if not, no big deal..

Like I said, Google sent me 8-10 times more traffic than Yahoo, like you said, because more people use it, and it's a free site (for end users, it's still real hosting ), it doesn't make any money, there's no sponsors, so I can't really justify spending money with Inktomi or Yahoo for the few users it brings me (maybe 300-500 people/mo, as opposed to Google sending me 3000-5000 or more people per mo)

Will this reopen the possibility that MS might try again to grab Google?

I doubt it, Google's still worth a fortune, so I doubt ol' Billy Boy would be willing to part with enough cash - although MS's search may utilize Google's database (if it doesn't already).