In a significant recognition that Web search engines have become a de facto starting place for all kinds of serious research, several content partners with high-end, subscription-based information products have opened up their databases to Yahoo! indexing. Subscribers will be able to click through to those partners’ databases from a Yahoo! search results screen. Here’s how the new Yahoo! Search Subscriptions works:
- Partners include ConsumerReports.org, The Wall Street Journal Online, TheStreet.com, The New England Journal of Medicine, IEEE, and Forrester. Deals are in the works with Factiva, LexisNexis, Thomson Gale, and ACM.
- Users can access a separate Subscriptions search screen or integrate searches of these sources with their ordinary Web searches. They can set their preferences to show results only from the information services they subscribe to.
- After searching on Yahoo!, users will see a special set of links at the top of the results list labeled “Subscription Results.” Those links go back to the publisher’s site: users already logged in to that service will go right to the full text of the content, while users who are not logged in or are not subscribers will be presented with a log-in screen and/or an offer to subscribe.
In Outsell’s opinion, this is a slam-dunk success for both Yahoo! and its partners.
- It’s a ringing endorsement of Web search as the starting point for all research, even for the “serious” work-related and academic research performed by the users who are the target markets of these content providers. Despite their best efforts to adapt to a Web-centric information environment, these players have come to understand that they are leaving money on the table by not exposing their content to the vast number of searches conducted on the major search engines every day.
- It’s also an acknowledgement by publishers and aggregators that lead generation can work for content as well as for other types of products on the Web. Having your content appear at the top of a Yahoo! search results list can be good for business.
- The opportunities for experimentation in pricing and offerings are endless. Some of the content partners have already set up limits on how quickly their content will appear on Yahoo! and how deep the archives will go – with the clear intention of saving the most current and deepest content collection for subscribers who use their native interfaces. Time will tell which of those models works best, but the stage is set for some creative experimentation.
- This is a “something for everybody” collection of content partners that is a good starting point. Business people, IT folks, scientists, and engineers will all find something in these proprietary collections they’ll like – just as they have all found good stuff on the open Web through Yahoo! to date.
- The inclusion of Factiva, LexisNexis, and other aggregators presents an entirely new dimension as well. For one thing, it’s clear there will be overlap in the search results coming from these aggregators and participating publishers. But here again, the name of the game will be lead generation in addition to giving their subscribers the choice of using Yahoo! or a proprietary interface. It seems like just yesterday when Factiva acknowledged the importance of the Web by including Web results in Factiva searches. Now the tables have been turned: Factiva results will be in Web searches.
- This is a significant step for Yahoo! in its arms race with Google. As of now, no money is changing hands between Yahoo! and the partners, but look for various forms of revenue-sharing to kick in over time as partners experiment.
