Chris Meller

As much as Google and Yahoo! continue to battle each other for ground in the search engine wars, I’m really surprised at some of the areas in which they don’t compete at all.

First, let’s look at some of the things that have been matched play-by-play on each side. These are in no particular order, nor am I indicating in any way which came first.

Now, we could go on and on with this list, and even though one might be the leader in one category and the other in another, in the end we’d come out fairly even. I don’t want to get into which is better, or even if they really are at all. My point here is simply that they’ve been neck and neck with each other for years. No matter what Google does, Yahoo! always matches or tries to beat it, and vice versa.

So as you can understand, I’m a bit surprised that Yahoo! has let Google be the leader in a few areas. Namely:

• Adsense
• Site Search

Now, as you may or may not know (and which I’ve been meaning to rant about), back in December, I actually tried to cheat at Adsense. Now, it was honestly more of an experiment than it was actual greediness. Every night I’d sit down and run thru some known open proxies and generate clicks on my own ads, just to see how much I could make and if they’d catch me. Well, along about Christmas time, I gave up and decided it wasn’t worth it (after about a month of cheating the system and earning around $70).

Well, a month later (the end of January), I got an email from Google saying I’d been found in violation of the Adsense Terms of Service. Ever since, I’ve found that I’ve been totally blacklisted from everything Google. Not only do my new Adsense registrations drop into cybernetic oblivion, but if I even try to register for a regular Google account (such as for Search History tracking), I get a meaningless error that the service requested is unavailable (registration goes right through if I use a different email account). Because of this, I’ve grown increasingly pissed off at Google, not because it’s in the wrong here, but merely because it refuses to stand up for itself and tell me that I’ve been blacklisted. No, it just decides to covertly ignore my Adsense registrations and give me a meaningless and totally inaccurate error message when I try to register for anything else.

So, the reason I told you all that is this: I’ve been looking for Adsense alternatives. Since Google has also removed links to the offending site from their index and refuses to do site-search for the site, I’m also looking for alternatives to it.

In my quest to find alternatives, I first started with what I thought would be the most logical alternative: Yahoo!. They’re Google’s biggest competitor, I figured they’d happily be offering alternatives to every Google product in existence.

Unfortunately, Yahoo! only appears to offer their advertising network to sites receiving an enormous number of hits a day (I believe the figure was 2 million/day). They also don’t offer any form of site-only search, unless you manually specify the site in your query (ie: “site:www.incoherentbabble.com”).

I find this very odd. Both of these products are one of the most attractive offerings Google provides to website owners from small to insanely large. Whether you’re picking up some extra cash to help cover your hosting bill every month or making $1,000 like Weblogs, Inc. Adsense can help you get the money you need. Site Search also helps keep you from re-inventing the wheel when you need to search your content. If I were running Yahoo!, I think I’d take notice here. This is obviously a very lucrative deal for Google, and one that I’d think everyone else would want to try and get in on.

Maybe that’s just me though…