What’s It Gonna Take To Get You Behind The Wheel Of This Yahoo?
|
Written By Reprise Media | February 9, 2006 | Share This
|
|
Do you Yahoo!? If not, they’d like to know what you’d Yahoo for: about 5 percent of Yahoo Mail users have received a survey from the search firm asking what, if any, monthly reward would encourage them to make Yahoo! their primary search engine.
News.com reports that although Yahoo hasn’t yet definitely committed to an incentives program in order to boost their share of the search market, they did solicit feedback from users on a number of potential enticements, among them: infinite Yahoo Mail storage, free MP3s, airline miles, donations of Yahoo search proceeds to charity, or even the elimination of Yahoo Mail ads - if that’s a reward, are they trying to say that their ads are a form of punishment?
But Yahoo wouldn’t just be giving out music files on the honor system; subscribers to such a program (should Yahoo go ahead with it) would have to use a specialized search box or toolbar to prove that they’re giving Yahoo most of their monthly search queries, or risk negating their discount at Yahoo Personals. While no one is out-and-out calling this a cockamamie scheme, not everyone thinks a gifts-for-search program is the way to go. Bubblegeneration, for one, suggests an alternative:
“Don’t pay people to use search - pay people to help improve Yahoo search. Give anyone a tiny micropayment for a tiny contribution to Y search. Leverage the massively distributed specialization of the edge to improve/filter/rank results.”
Now we’re getting complicated. However, in some parts of the world, Yahoo might gain fans by simply refusing to turn people over to the fuzz. Another News.com story reports that French activist group Reporters Without Borders is alleging that Yahoo helped turn over a second Chinese dissident to authorites. Yahoo spokesperson Mary Osako says that her company is certainly not in the business of policing, but merely giving the Chinese government what data they are “legally compelled to provide.” We want to give Yahoo the benefit of the doubt, so we look forward to hearing their testimony at next week’s Congressional hearings.
Topics: Search: Innovations |