This is not typically how sponsored listings have worked with other Overture partners such as AOL Search and Netscape Search. The standard approach is to promote first 2, 3 or 4 listings from Overture and discard rest. The consequence of this is there have been major bidding wars for these positions.

On negative front, consumer awareness groups, small business owners and search engine marketers are less than thrilled with this current trend. The arguments range from misleading searchers, to stealing web away from businesses with small budgets, to just being plain lousy results.

The proponents suggest this is beginning of a new viable business model for search engines. The free ride is over.

Either way, deal between Yahoo and Overture expires in April, states an Associated Press article. The article goes on to say, this deal... "can serve as a short-term solution for Yahoo! until it can develop sales force and technical capability to offer paid search listings itself." Full article can be found here: http://www.nando.net echnology/story/169861p-1634746c.html

I stumbled across this entirely by accident, since it never occurred to me that someone would write a program such as this. I downloaded 30 day demonstration and quickly discovered how wonderful it is. Robogen has already saved me hours and hours of work.

Okay, here's how it works. You enter your FTP login information and log into your site. You then select robots by name in left pane, and indicate which directories and/or files are to be excluded by robot in right pane.

You can create a new file or edit an existing one. Even better, Robogen will work directly off "robots.txt" file on your web site. It will log in, read existing file, allow you to edit to your hearts content, then update file directly.

I like little specialized tool such as this which truly make a webmasters life easy. The product is inexpensive (there is a limited free version as well), well documented and complete. Highly recommended.