Yahoo released Yahoo Search Builder yesterday in what TechCrunch points out is a “strong competitive move against personal search startups like Eurekster and Rollyo.”

Yahoo lets you play around with the color scheme of your search box and choose whether to search the web, your site, Yahoo News or all three. Once you have it configured the search box you can embed the code in your site. Great right?

Here’s the problem with the business model that all three companies, including Yahoo, are using. - hint: it has something to do with advertising- Say I set a search box to search only this site, say for “shopping cart.” When the results are displayed I want visitors to stay at my site, not wander off into sponsorland. Without having to scroll the user would see 16.74 square inches of search results (we’ll do inches not pixels because this is all going to be percentages soon anyway).

Of that 16.74, a total of 7.53 square inches (4.3+3.23) is taken up by sponsor links. This is nothing users of Yahoo search aren’t used to seeing, but this constitutes 45% of the viewable search results. Yahoo is making money while you get a cheap and not exactly groundbreaking plug-in for your website. Where’s the revenue sharing? Eurekster shares the advertising love with its search box.

What Yahoo needs to be doing is working on a premium version of the search box that keeps users within the same site, or at the very least does away with sponsored links. I realize Yahoo actually has a business plan, unlike many other companies out there these days, and hope they are working on the enterprise level search box now.