Yahoo Offers Premium Content Search

Posted on January 25, 2002

divine, inc. and Yahoo Inc. announced an agreement to jointly offer a premium online research library. Yahoo Premium Document Search will provide consumers the opportunity to purchase information otherwise not readily available on the Web, from divine/Northern Light Special Collection, an online research library of over 70 million pages of full-text content from more than 7,100 sources. Divine obtained the database in its recent acquisition of Northern Light, a provider of search and content integration solutions for enterprises.

"divine is extremely excited about this agreement with Yahoo! and the opportunity to deliver our Special Collection library to a larger audience than ever before," said David Seuss, the former chief executive officer of Northern Light Technology who has joined divine in a leadership position. "We are committed to providing high-quality knowledge resources and best-of-breed content procurement and content management technologies, enabling companies and end-users to more efficiently gather timely and targeted information. Through this agreement, Yahoo can offer its customers premium content that they otherwise would not find on the Web."

Through this agreement, consumers will have access to content from thousands of business, health, science, and news magazines and trade journals, hundreds of newspapers, medical publications, and academic journals. Consumers can also purchase reference reports, and access archived news from over 60 US and international newswires. Consumers will be able to view free summaries of documents based on their search results prior to purchase. Documents can be purchased two ways: individually, with prices depending on the document; or through a subscription basis, in which consumers have access to up to 50 documents for $4.95 per month.

Yahoo has slowly been adding premium and subscription services over the past 12 months, including premium web hosting, increased auction fees, adding paid keywords from Overture, charging an annual fee to list commercial websites, a premium stock quote service, charging for extra mail storage, a bill paying service and many others. The company began struggling when growth in online advertising declined in 2001 during the dot-com crash. Yahoo has been adding fee-based services ever since to increase its revenues.

"The divine Special Collection library is a great fit for our global, online audience. This deal with divine enables Yahoo! to provide consumers with a more valuable, and powerful online search experience, where they can find the information that matters most to them," said Scott Gatz, vice president, search and directory at Yahoo.