Thanks for your comment and the link to the article.

Over the past few weeks I’ve come to the conclusion that paid inclusion has a better chance of survival. The Paid Inclusion team seems to be functioning as usual, though there are some mixed signals when it comes to negotiation of IOs and time frames.

I suppose the latter might be a preventative measure to ensure a smooth transition once Bing is integrated but … it also leaves the door open for full closure.

On the positive side, PI is clearly a source of revenue that has relatively low overhead for Yahoo! On the negative side, search really isn’t Yahoo’s continuing focus so it may be more trouble than it’s worth.

No matter how it shakes out, the world of search is changing and that’s always interesting. Thanks again for your comment.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I work for a search engine marketing company and we provide adwords, sponsored search and search submit pro (aka PI) services to our clients.

From what Hilary Schneider said during an interview this week, Yahoo plans to continue to blend unique content into Yahoo search results and retain a unique user experience from Bing. This means there is a high probability that search results on Yahoo and Bing will differ. This leads me to believe that PI has a better chance live on.

Hilary Schneider said, “It was important to Yahoo to retain full flexibility over the user experience because it’s integral to the overall user experience at Yahoo and the way we think about search and discovery horizontally across the sites and services we deliver. Our innovation is going to be associated with how we integrate, and deliver with relevance, unique content that we have. If you think about Flickr, Answers … the set of experiences that we deliver, it will be driven by the unique components that are Yahoo and really blending those into the search results in a way that we think will give Yahoo users the best experience.”

Here’s the entire article: http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/29/schnieder-mehdi-yahoo-microsoft-technology-paidcontent.html

In the end, the future of paid inclusion is up in the air as you note. My guess is that it will survive, but who knows for sure.