I would agree that spending time submitting articles to the various directory sites as Amy did is a much better investment than the $299 Yahoo submission.
Now, I will admit, I did pay for the listing for two of my sites and if you have the budget for it, it certainly can't hurt. But these days, there are so many other ways to get Google to notice you (ezine articles, backlinks, blogs, etc.) and I don't believe that the Yahoo directory submission is as useful as it once was.
But the only reason to submit to the directory would be for the benefit of having a high quality link pointing to your site. You won't get a lot of traffic from people browsing the directory. My fitness site gets a decent amount of traffic from it, but my web hosting site hardly gets any.
The bottom line with Google is they want good quality, unique, content-rich websites. That's what draws in advertisers and supports their bottom line. Remember, their main product is content so that's why they are very selective about how they include/rank pages. Quality is everything to them and it's why they've been so successful.
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