Via the invaluable John Battelle, a pointer to this Search Engine Watch piece on the advent of Paid Search over at Yahoo. It contains some remarkable examples of marketingese, and I thought it would be helpful to provide a translation.
You may want to open that (excellent, by the way) Search Engine Watch piece in another window to follow along as we provide simultaneous translation; “Cadogan” is Tim Cadogan, Yahoo’s VP of Search.
Cadogan: What we are excited about is having a better relationship with the people who are providing content. There’s currently a lot of uncertainty and guesswork. We think there's a lot of room for improvement.
Translation: You send us money, you’ll get better placement in search results.
Cadogan: It [rolling all the Yahoo, Altavista, Alltheweb programs together] radically simplifies the situation from having six programs to one that gets you a ton of distribution and gets you a lot of benefits from interacting with us.
Translation: All the money you pay for better search-engine results can now be sent to one place.
Cadogan: Search engines do what they will, and the web site has to guess what they're doing. We're going to continue to do that. But on top of that we're going to reach out to providers and engage them. Part of the way we want to do that is to create a much more transparent, structured relationship between us and content providers.
Translation: Send us money, and we’ll help you game our system to get better search-engine results.
Cadogan: We want to get much much more content. That means reaching out to providers that are not currently on the web—invisible web databases. We are reaching out to major content providers, in academia, government, libraries and so on, and creating a structured interaction with them.
Translation: There are lots of people out there who aren’t in our engine so they can’t send us money to get better results. We’re trying to fix that.
S.E.W.: Yahoo's new paid inclusion program could potentially open up new controversy surrounding the issue of disclosure. While the company clearly labels paid placement “sponsor results” and places them in separate areas of result pages, the new paid inclusion listings are not explicitly differentiated—even though they generate cost-per-click revenues for Yahoo.
Translation: No shit.
Original: Cadogan insists that this isn't a problem, because there is no difference in treatment between pages participating in the inclusion program and those found naturally. “Payment is linked with the interaction. The payment does not connect with the ranking,” he said. “We're going to do everything we can to reward good sites and punish bad sites, period.”
Translation: Cadogan claims that people who send money can’t count on getting better results.
Do You Believe That Last Bit? · I don’t.
