Yahoo Goes Deep

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 8/1/2005

Web search engine Yahoo has launched a new service for those who go online for their research needs. Dubbed Yahoo Search Subscriptions, the beta site allows subscribers of paid content to peruse several resources—all in a single search.

“This is content that hasn't been accessible to Web crawlers because it's been behind a log-in screen,” says Tim Mayer, a product management director at Yahoo. Known as deep Web, this tool allows engines to locate information that lies behind a pay wall. While Yahoo is not the first to use this technology, it is the first of the major search engines to offer it to users.

Through Yahoo Search Subscriptions, teachers, librarians, and students can simultaneously mine seven top online research sites: The Wall Street Journal Online, Consumer Reports, the Financial Times, The Street.com, The New England Journal of Medicine, Forrester Research, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. In coming weeks, Yahoo is expected to add four more resources—LexisNexis, Factiva, Thomson-Gale, and the Association of Computing Machinery, says Mayer.

After users enter a search term, Yahoo's search engine will retrieve pertinent links to content from the various sources. However, users must have a valid subscription to a particular site to view its content. But some, such as LexisNexis, enable a “pay as you go” fee structure that lets researchers purchase specific articles.

However, the deep Web search is not available from Yahoo's main page, which may deter some from using it—or even finding it.

“I think it's going to be very useful, once it's integrated into the regular search results,” says Charlene Li, principal analyst in the media and marketing area at Forrester Research, one of the participating sites. Still, Li believes that the deep Web search function will eventually appear on the site's main page—giving researchers a real reason then to Yahoo.