Amusingly, Yahoo tries desperately to make money again

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhuanet)-- Yahoo Inc. on Thursday has begun testing a service that lets people search for information on sites in which they pay for access to the content.

Called Yahoo Se arch Subscriptions, the new service indexes fee-based content and makes it searchable.

Yahoo's strategy aims to build loyalty by letting people customize search to meet their personal needs. The same strategy, called personalization, is also used by Yahoo rivals Google Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and others.

Search Subscriptions allows the users to view the list of subscription-based sources, the subscribers being offered the possibility to view their content, while the other users can chose to pay the fee for the same option.

Subscription services that have signed up with Yahoo include ConsumerReports.org, The Wall Street Journal Online, TheStreet.com and The New England Journal of Medicine. In the coming weeks, Yahoo plans to add content aggregators Factiva and LexisNexis AlaCarte.

However, Tim Mayer, director of product management for Yahoo search technology, argued that subscription search provides a core service by potentially giving consumers one location to search for information they may already be paying for.

"Improving comprehensiveness (in search) is a key pillar to product quality and relevance," Mayer said. Enditem

Haha, those Yahoo assholes. LOL there's no money (for you idiots) on the Internet!

HAY WOT didn't charging for "Geocities "pay the electric bill (and I mean Google's electric bill seeing how you use their search engine now anyway???)?? Why that didn't work huh, WOW

[Lysander]

Yahoo's being, how should I say, incredibly fucking *gay* lately.

I'm too lazy to hunt down a news article on this, but basically, Yahoo got threatened with a 20 million dollar lawsuit because so much underaged adult chatting was going on in their chat rooms. They solved this problems by... uh... eliminating the ability to create your own chat room. (Side note: I LOL at their under construction notice: "User rooms are unavailable while we modify them to be more compatible with our terms of service." That is to say, non existent!) Now... I have a working brain, so I'm already above the calibur of everyone who works at Yahoo, but let me try and analyze this. The TOS says plainly that people are going to see objectionable thins in chat rooms and that it's not their fault. Then in order to get into the "romance" category, which any idiot can tell means "fucking". But after *that* you have to go to "adult." And just in case these brain surgans can't figure out what "adult romance" means, there's a warning box that pops up telling you you're not allowed to go in there unless you're under 18, which throws your innocent virginal image right out the window already if you go in there. And *then* you have to select "user rooms", which has, again, another warning box that says you should be careful becasue Yahoo didn't make them so they could be offensive. So how is this Yahoo's fault, exactly? And how does eliminating the ability to create your own chat room stop... well... ANYTHING that was already happening from happening? All it does is piss everybody off. I mean, I know, it's all about doing as little as possible to satisfy the soccer moms, but is it really too much to ask for that a freaking multi-million-dollar international corporation get a damn backbone? There's no way they'd lose in court.