Yahoo Search Subscriptions, a rather useless service

Lately, it seems that is has become some sort of rule for the search engines to come up with something new, yet another service or tool to help us in our searches across the Internet.

And this time it's Yahoo!'s turn to amaze us with Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, a stylish name for a rather old idea. Search engines that have dedicated their entire existence to indexing ultra-specialized sites or domains have existed in the past and some still do exist nowadays.

Out of all these domains Yahoo! has decided to pick the subscription-based sites. The problem is that the users in dire need of this type of content are probably subscribing to the resources they're interested in, and do not need a search engine in order to find a certain article. Instead, they could go straight to the site itself.

Another problem is that Yahoo! has chosen the same method for listing the results as in the case of any Web search. The phrases presented by the search engine could be relevant, but what if the user discovers, after paying the subscription and accessing the entire content, that only those phrases are related to what he's interested in?

For now, the number of indexed sources is also a small one, in order to assure a certain level of success for this idea, but Yahoo! seems to forget that a search done using an advanced search engine should return the most relevant information, as fast as possible, without compelling the user to go through a pain staking registration process.

In conclusion, Yahoo! Search Subscription will either build itself a base of loyal users (but a small one, nevertheless), or will succumb as an experiment gone wrong.