ComTech News

Back in August I posted an article called “Is Yahoo Crazy?“, well my friends I think the answer is now a clear yes . In that article I picked mostly on the fact that Yahoo Released a service called Yahoo! Search Builder that lets you build your own search engine and customize the results.

I asked readers to comment on their blog about allowing Publishers to monazite the results and Yahoo has responded with the following,

From Ariel at the Yahoo Post about Search Builder: “Actually, yes! Stay tuned. In the meantime, if you have some ideas/thoughts that would make for a killer integration of Search Builder with Yahoo! Publisher Network please let us know!”

That response came only after numerous questions about adding this feature that were totally ignored.

What?

Here is one, DO IT! Follow the Nike creed and “Just Do It“, that is “the killer idea” there is no more. The failure of Yahoo to do so has prompted me to set up a few Swicki’s to test the effectiveness of them. I set one up for Comtech News you can see it on the upper right side of our Blog or link strait to it here “Comtech’s Swicki“.

I have also set up one for iPod Modifications and one for African House Snakes. All of them have not really been marketed at all just played with and a few links and site integrations tried.

The results? I am making a few extra dollars with Google adSense, not a lot but mind you I just tossed these together to test the principal. Now add to this the fact that I must SPLIT my adSense revenue 50-50 with Swicki and you start to realize that this concept is a damn good one.

So here sits Yahoo and they have

1. A new search engine builder that works well
2. A group of hand selected beta publishers with a huge combined web presence ready to go.
3. The ability to finally have something that Google does not in the contextual ad market

And once again they sit in their foxhole with the cross hairs on the enemy and refuse to pull the trigger. Honestly it would take perhaps 1-2 hours of programming maximum to write the code to give this tools to their Publishers and they sit back and wonder why “Search Builder” is just not taking off.

Why? I can build a Swicki and get 50% of the adSense Revenue or I can build a Yahoo Custom Search and get NOTHING. If those are my choices I will take the 50% share any day.

The good news is this has all prompted me to look deeper into Swicki and start building some custom community searches. I encourage you to try out our ComTech Swicki and suggest some sites for various searches, etc. It is very intuitive so I am sure you will catch on fast.

I will do a more in-depth article focused just on Swicki in the future but I would like your personal input here. Why indeed does Yahoo do some crazy things? Are they just acting like their name or is there some hidden wisdom in their seemingly self destructive behavior?

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: yahoo, search, search builder, swicki, eurekster, social search, seo, sem, adsense, contextual advertising, pay per click, search engine, marketing, ipod modifications

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