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Yahoo expands its search engine with government sites

Yahoo! Inc, owner the second-most used Internet search engine, is expanding its search results with more Web pages from non-profit and government agencies, including the US Library of Congress, as it tries to draw more Web surfers.

Yahoo also changed its pricing plan for a service that lets businesses pay to have Web sites included in search results, charging more to Web sites that receive more traffic, Yahoo vice president Tim Cadogan said in an interview from New York.

Yahoo is trying to get more people to use its search engine to boost sales of advertising connected to search results. The company is competing for advertisers with Google Inc, which overtook Yahoo as the most-used Web site for searches last year.

Google is planning an initial public offering of stock, people familiar with its plans have said.

"It's an advantage to them to really go out and find this content, if Yahoo seriously wants to compete with Google," said Chris Sherman, president of consulting firm Searchwise in Boulder, Colorado, and associate editor of the newsletter SearchDay.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, said last month that its search engine includes more than 6 billion Web pages, more pages than any other search engine. Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, hasn't disclosed how many pages its search engine includes.

Yahoo provided a search service with software licensed from Google before introducing its own search engine last month. Yahoo purchased search-engine developers Inktomi Corp and Overture Services Inc last year, gaining technology to build its own software.

National Public Radio, the New York Public Library, and other institutions also have agreed to provide Yahoo's search engine with links to sites it might otherwise miss, Cadogan said. The agreements are part of Yahoo's effort to include more of what Cadogan called "the invisible Web" in search results.

Yahoo also is letting busi-nesses pay to have pages included in results.

The service, which Yahoo calls "Site Match," is different from Yahoo's sponsored-search advertising service, which generates most of the revenue from Yahoo's search engine by displaying advertisers' sites related to a user's query.

The sponsored search service lets companies bid against each other for the right to have links to their Web sites at the top of search results. Sponsored search results are labeled as advertisements to distinguish them from regular search results.

With Site Match, Yahoo doesn't guarantee prominent placement for customers' Web sites. Yahoo also doesn't label the pages of Site Match customers.

Yahoo clients that use Site Match will now pay rates ranging from US$0.15 per visit to their sites to more than US$1 for businesses that want to list more than 1,000 Web pages, Yahoo said in a statement.

Yahoo also lowered the upfront charge for the Site Match service to US$49 for an advertiser to list a single site.

Previously, Yahoo charged US$150 for a customer to have a site included in search results, Cadogan said.

The upfront charge will be reduced for customers who submit more Web pages.
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