MOVIEPROP.COM'S Yahoo Pages
Yahoo Submission Troubles
In the beginning everyone loved Yahoo as it let people find what they need without spam or filth which then reigned supreme in search engines. But as the internet evolved so to did the search engines and their technology. Yahoo on the other hand has not refined its search features really at all. Yahoo basically places sites in categories and gives them a title and sometimes a description. If one browses through Yahoo by category things run smoothly, but few do this as most use the handy search feature. As a result of their search technology a search for a word misspelled by a single letter will result in no category or site listings found. This results in purchased inktomi search engine data being returned. Most users do not notice the difference but site submitters certainly do.
In addition to search dificulties, and a primitive search technology Yahoo is very slow with processing site submissions. With their current surfing staff and technologies I am sure they do all they can to add what they can. But even with the manpower they have, improvements to the submission process can occur. Yahoo uses a multiscreen process for submission which is far more time intensive to submitters than that used by other directories.
Yahoo offers a business express submission service which promises a site will be reviewed yea or nah within 7 business days for $199. This seems a good idea for those who can afford the funds, but why is the service only available for business sites, and why so high of a cost. To combat site submissions by those who have put little effort into their sites a smaller fee could be charged not to earn money for Yahoo but instead to discourage poor submissions. A $10 fee per submission for a more speedy review should pay for a surfers time and help quality sites to get in faster. A site should take no more than 30 minutes to review even for the most in-depth of reviews. At $199 that equates to $400 an hour for Yahoo via biz express service which is absurd and insane.
If fee based techniques can not be used to speed up processing of quality content submissions then technology can be used. All submissions could be automatically checked for link popularity or the number of sites which link to them. If a submitted page is not listed in Yahoo and it has 4000 sites linked to it, then it should be at the top of the list to be reviewed for example. To further weed out bad submissions, sites could be put into a few categories of priority, those with 0 sites linked to them, those with 2 or more and those with a whole lot. Links are how people on-line vote for their favorite sites, search engines like altavista know this and use link popularity and so should Yahoo at least to help in handling submissions.
The real beef most webmasters have with Yahoo is not that they are hurt that their site was rejected for inclusion in their directory but that they just don't know. In Yahoo's help screens about submitting they suggest resubmitting a site every two weeks. This seems a rather elitist attitude. A site should be reviewed or rejected and everyone should know even if it this occurs over a long timespan. Instead people submit and submit again, always fearing they will have submitted too much and triggered some anti-spam submission program they are not aware of which is barring all their submissions anyhow. In addition to submitting every two weeks. Yahoo has a support e-mail address which one can e-mail them at to inquire about a submission after it has been submitted twice. This gives webmaters yet another chore to do as now they have to submit their site every two weeks and send messages to url support every month or so.
There are of course many other things which infuriate webmasters about Yahoo, many of which Yahoo has no control over. Yahoo has let in strange things in the past as the early days of the web offered little quality content so what was available was pretty much indexed. Since nothing is removed crappy sites from four years ago with lengthy descriptions exist side by side with newer sites of often far more quality that are given no descriptions at all. if even listed. If Yahoo believes the sites it has indexed are the best another technological way to automatically solicit submissions would be to routinely check listed sites to see if 3 or more sites in a given category link to another url in unison. If for example a category about gun collecting has 10 sites and 3 of the sites link to another site not in Yahoo which has the keyword gun on the page a few times, then the site should be moved up for a more speedy review. All this could be done with technology. After all if many of the best site's already categorized think a given site is good then maybe it too belongs in that category with them.
One should seldom have the case when a category has 10 sites and they all link to a single site which they believe is the best but yet which has never been reviewed by Yahoo.
Depending on how much Yahoo would wish to take the idea of making submitters happy they could give additional speed to site submissions that are endorsed via e-mail by a site which has been given a cool designation in Yahoo. If Yahoo thinks one site is cool why not empower that site to influence other sites which are allowed more speedily into Yahoo? If Humans organizing the web is the goal why not equip the experts out in the field with the means to help the surfers? Not everyone out there wishes to spam the hell out of Yahoo but if submissions continue to be ignored by the best sites from the best creative minds then many will learn to ignore the hell out of Yahoo and seek better areas for searching.
To survive in the future as a viable directory Yahoo will either have to use technology, hire a lot more workers, or watch as other directories such as the Open Directory Project www.dmoz.org simply blow them away with shere numbers of editors.
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