Yahoo! and Microsoft finally won regulatory approval in both the United States and Europe for their radical approach to reducing competition in the Web search industry: Yahoo! is abandoning its search engineering capabilities and Microsoft is buying up as many Yahoo! engineers as it can get its hands on.
Yahoo! will replace its custom search results with Bing search results. Microsoft will replace its advertising network with Yahoo!'s advertising network.
The net result for consumers is that they will lose a distinctive search brand and algorithm that have provided them with choice for years. In fact, when word of the deal was first announced last summer Web marketers began mobilizing their resources en masse to start replicating their Google search results on Bing. That means that in another year or so what you find in Google you'll also find in Bing. When you don't find what you are actually looking for, you'll have to turn to other search tools like Ask and Cuil (AOL simply rebrands Google search results).
For the science fiction fan site community this will prove to be a hard blow because fan sites have already been pushed out of many relevant queries by commercial entertainment sites that publish relatively inarticulate fluff. These sites have the kind of "brand" value that Google feels searchers should find: minimal content, lots of advertising, and generally unoriginal thinking.
The science fiction fan site community will need to start looking at ways to promote content-friendly search services by using their tools and widgets for site search. Ask.com is the next leading search algorithm provider but truth be told fans may want to look at resources like Cuil.com instead, assuming Cuil gets its act together and starts promoting its service through search boxes and other tools.
If you want to know more about the Yahoo!/Microsoft deal hurts consumers and advertisers, then head over to SEO Theory and read Good-bye Yahoo! Search.
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Showing posts with label yahoo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label yahoo. Show all posts
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
When fan sites vanish
I found a dead link on a Tolkien fan site and notified the owner. It appears the original site has been taken down, for reasons I cannot fathom.
The old site, http://home.freeuk.net/webbuk2/tolkien-biography.htm, was titled An Illustrated Biography of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Demonstrating no special skill at designing fancy Web sites, the author nonetheless produced a remarkable tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien. You can see one of the last versions of the site here, but only if FreeUK.net doesn't block the archive through robots.txt.
In a relatively short time, many other fan sites will be taken down forever. Yahoo! recently announced that it was discontinuing the Geocities free hosting service. Thousands of science fiction and fantasy Web sites, long abandoned by their creators, will soon cease to exist.
If we're lucky, Yahoo! won't block archive.org from indexing Geocities content, but don't hold your breath.
Seizing the moment, Webring has offered hosting service to GeoCities users. Webring itself started life as an independent service, then was bought by Yahoo!, and was relaunched as an independent service.
If you have favorite Web sites hosted on GeoCities, you would be well advised to save them to your personal drives. You may never see them again. If you know someone who once had a GeoCities account, maybe they'll want to save their work (if they can) and move it to another service.
Many academics once had GeoCities accounts, too. A lot of research -- perhaps only published on GeoCities -- is about to vanish forever.
The loss of intangible value in fan sites and other content will be inestimable and it is unstopable.
SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.
The old site, http://home.freeuk.net/webbuk2/tolkien-biography.htm, was titled An Illustrated Biography of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Demonstrating no special skill at designing fancy Web sites, the author nonetheless produced a remarkable tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien. You can see one of the last versions of the site here, but only if FreeUK.net doesn't block the archive through robots.txt.
In a relatively short time, many other fan sites will be taken down forever. Yahoo! recently announced that it was discontinuing the Geocities free hosting service. Thousands of science fiction and fantasy Web sites, long abandoned by their creators, will soon cease to exist.
If we're lucky, Yahoo! won't block archive.org from indexing Geocities content, but don't hold your breath.
Seizing the moment, Webring has offered hosting service to GeoCities users. Webring itself started life as an independent service, then was bought by Yahoo!, and was relaunched as an independent service.
If you have favorite Web sites hosted on GeoCities, you would be well advised to save them to your personal drives. You may never see them again. If you know someone who once had a GeoCities account, maybe they'll want to save their work (if they can) and move it to another service.
Many academics once had GeoCities accounts, too. A lot of research -- perhaps only published on GeoCities -- is about to vanish forever.
The loss of intangible value in fan sites and other content will be inestimable and it is unstopable.
SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.
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