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June 27, 2005
Yahoo Beta: Deep Search and Subscription based web sites.
By Scott Goodyear
Yahoo is now beta testing a new search service called Deep Search. Deep Search is an opportunity for subscription based web sites to be indexed by a major search engine as currently search engine spiders are unable to login/scan through password protected websites. It appears that this may be a great opportunity for lead generation for this type of site as well. At the time of this writing there were seven sources that one could choose from in order to search on excerpts from premium/subscription article content: Consumer Reports, IEEE Publications, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, the New England Journal of Medicine, Forrester Research, and The Street.
Currently many subscription based news sites like Salon.com, The Washington Post, the New York Times, and others rely on article excerpts to be shown on news sites and news aggregator sites like Wired, Google News, etc. These article excerpts usually link to a landing page encouraging you to subscribe in order to read the rest of the article. Some users, like me, may find this to be a bit of a turn off as I will always opt for a free news site, but what happens when you want to search only on a specific subject, from a specific source perhaps to see if a particular publication has a lot of coverage on a certain subject area before you subscribe, or subscribe to a competitor, or search for a free publication? This is where Yahoo Deep Search could potentially shine for these types of subscription-based publications if the publications optimize for Deep Search.
Like a normal search engine search, the way in which the pages are or are not spider friendly or human visitor friendly can surely make a large difference in conversions.
Here is a search result against the Wall Street Journal regarding a search on WebTrends:
"Dominion Bond Rating Service Cuts GM and Its Canadian Unit U.S. Treasurys Extend Losses By Carolyn KingDow Jones Newswires ... is now at R-2 (low) and its long-term debt at BBB (low). The trends remain negative. ... confirming all ratings on Ford Motor, but said the trends remain negative...?"
This summary is not directly related to my query, WebTrends, but what if I want to dig into the article a little deeper, just in case? I click through the link and it brings me to a subscription page that does not clarify or even re-display the excerpt in the original format.
Others sites may be a little more prepared for this type of excerpt search and clarification for potential subscribers. In a similar search against Forrester Research, the extract was much easier to read:
"On March 28, private-equity firm Francisco Partners purchased NetIQ's WebTrends division for $94 million in cash. Forrester's take? The investors, backed by a $2.5 billion fund, got a great deal and now they've got the perfect opportunity to turn WebTrends into an online marketing and analytics powerhouse."
While this might be on the subject that I was looking for, if I did wish to clarify, I could click through the link and go to an excerpt web page that actually gives me a bit more than just a pitch asking for me to subscribe, it re-displays the information that was seen in summary through the Yahoo Deep Search results page.
Subscription based content should be considered in your overall SEO strategy.
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