On the heels of saying they were not going to focus on being #1 search and then taking that back, Yahoo is now flirting around with an incentive plan for users who switch to their search. What a cliche this “incentives to do XYZ thing” is and for them it’s a sign of desperation to me. It’s one thing to start a new program and have incentives, but trying to incent people to switch to an existing product is problematic on a number of levels.

It’s another form of white flag waving, for one.

I’ve seen this whole incentives thing played out in an attempt to get users from more popular destinations before and it hasn’t worked then and it won’t work now. One established forum I infrequently posted at started paying 5 cents per post to try and lure away posters from a more popular forum. A competitor chimed in by paying 10 cents per post. Of course both had to deal with an increase in the amount of crap posts that started rolling in and set a bunch of basic rules to handle who would get paid and who wouldn’t get paid, thus making the whole thing more convoluted and confusing. Here we are a couple years later and one board bit the dust and the other established one still pays 5 cents a post, but is only marginally more active than it was before they started paying for posts.

Yahoo might not be paying people to use their search engine, but how far behind is that? Here’s a much better idea that doesn’t require any incentive programs, Yahoo:

Make your search the best.

If their search is the best, they’ll have more users and more traffic to send webmasters like me. If I see more traffic I’ll be more interested. Traffic is the #1 incentive for a webmaster to be interested in a search engines. Get the webmasters on board, get the developers on board, get the users on board. Yahoo has done a good job working with the developers but they’ve failed with the other two parts of the triangle.

From a user perspective, I don’t know how many times I’ll write or say this when asked by any search engine what would get me to switch the answer is always the same: give me a better search. This is a major part of the reason Yahoo saying they were happy not being #1 — even if that’s not exactly the message they wanted to send — was so destructive. Now whatever they try to do creatively will be questioned and analyzed against these quotes.

People like Dave Taylor who erroneously called this desire to be #1 a “particular American way of thinking” need to cut out the regionalizing BS and analyze why every company needs to strive to be the best at what they do. Taylor attempts to do that by using Ferrari and citing sales numbers. which is a really bad analogy. A search engine needs numbers to survive and propser, a high performance car manufacturer can work within a niche being the best. It’s not “win or die” trying to be #1 it’s about making the best products/service that people need and like to use in the market. If that isn’t the goal of every serious company in business, then why shouldn’t we as customers use their competitor instead? For a search company being #1 must be the goal because with the most users searching that brings the most traffic to send back out to other websites and advertisers.

Thank you for providing me with yet another reason to consider divesting in your company, Yahoo. Ironically, I first saw this story linked at one of Yahoo’s employee’s blogs and then saw numerous articles yesterday and some blog posts today. Among the better posts comes from Mike at Techdirt who equated this to a form of ‘bribery’ in the headline.

Not sure this goes that far, and maybe that was just extreme hyperbole, but I think if this incentives thing doesn’t get nuked it will be yet another PR coup for Google to gloat: “We don’t have to incent people to use our search.”

Ouch.

Update 2/15/2006 6:21am PST: MSN Search incentifies searches.

• MSN Search and Win incentives already gamed
• Yahoo to make “speciality” audio search
• New Yahoo search spiders subscriber-only areas
• Yahoo launches audio search (beta)
• Update on Search Champs v4
• Yahoo management talking like search quitters again, please no more