The company said it has brought together the now defunct page submission services from Inktomi, AltaVista and AllTheWeb in one offering it calls Site Match. Customers are encouraged to migrate to the new service, but Yahoo will honor existing contracts.
The idea of the service is that web-heavy companies get more control over which of their pages are indexed by Yahoo. This can be particularly useful with dynamically generated pages, which web crawlers do not always find.
Site Match customers do not get preferential placement in search results, but they do get to see their pages indexed every 48 hours, Yahoo said. Usually, search engine crawlers take some weeks to spider the entire web and create their indexes.
As Yahoo has combined its acquired search technologies, the same index and algorithms will become common to the public-facing search engines at Yahoo, AllTheWeb and AltaVista over the next few weeks, a spokesperson said.
While Yahoo does not disclose the size of its index, AllTheWeb.com claims it currently indexes 3.15 billion pages. A spokesperson said the 3.15 billion number, which would make it about 75% the size of Google, does not apply to Yahoo Search.
Site Match brings in a pay-per-click pricing model that Inktomi pioneered in 2001 and Overture has always used in its sponsored search offerings. Customers with under 1,000 URLs are also asked to pay an upfront per-URL fee.
URL submission costs between $49 and $10 per URL, the company said. After that, cost-per-click is $0.15 for most categories of site, and $0.30 for sites in categories such as travel. Over 1,000 URLs, companies pay $1 per click, with no upfront fee.
Even if the prices are higher, customers now only have to pay for the one inclusion service, rather than paying for each AltaVista, Inktomi and Yahoo. Yahoo Search is also used by a set of partner sites, notably, but temporarily, Microsoft’s MSN.
Yahoo will also make a free version of the service available to selected government, academic and not-for-profit web sites, including the Library of Congress, National Public Radio and Northwestern University, which has an archive of Supreme Court audio.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
