Archive for the ‘Yahoo!’ Category
At the end of this post, I list the May 2007 market percentages of the largest players in the current online search industry. Once again, Google dramatically increased its lead in our space with an impressive 42.1% year-over-year growth rate in the month of April, to command more than 55% of the total search market.
What’s crazy to think about is, that when I entered our fledgling space back in the late 1990′s, Inktomi (purchased by Yahoo! in late 2002) was the T-Rex of the search engine landscape (with a combined market share of more than 42% at the time), and the now obscure Northern Light and AltaVista were nipping at its heals. Here is a snapshot of the other dinosaurs (and a one little furry creature) from August 1999:
Interesting article today across the wire from The Associated Press titled “Microsoft,Yahoo become latest to improve Internet search privacy” proclaiming that the search engines are limiting the length of time that they retain potentially sensitive user data. The article points-out that “the search engines all appear interested in staying a step ahead of regulators as the industry mines personal data to customize online ads tailored for the tastes and interests of each individual visitor.”
Yahoo! recently announced a new search suggestion feature. The Yahoo! search box now offers search suggestions as you type. For more information visit the Yahoo! Search Blog.
This quote was stated today by Sheryl Sandberg, the vice president of global online sales and operations for Google, during a forum with Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask at Fortune’s iMeme tech conference in San Francisco. As CNNMoney.com also reported today, the four giants of search didn’t always play nicely during this presentation.
Check out “Search Leaders Get Defensive” for a little insight into the competitiveness of our space at the very top.
Yahoo Search Marketing rolled out some new features to the Panama platform today. These features include:
- The ability to easily move & copy keywords from one ad group to another.
- A revised keyword selector tool. The new tool provides an estimate of monthly searches on each keyword suggested.
- An ad writing help guide. This guide will allow users to preview ads they would appear on the search results page.
For more details visit Yahoo’s Search Marketing Blog.
In the early days of search, meta description tags were a significant part of search engine optimization. Years ago, they were one of the many factors used by the search engines to determine rank. Today, however, meta description tags are important for a completely different reason. Currently, today’s sophisticated search engines often display the meta description on their search engine results pages (SERPs). This, in turn, can have a significant impact on click-through rates (CTRs).
I just caught the news across the wire that original co-founder Jerry Yang has replaced Terry Semel as CEO at Yahoo!. Apparently the Wall Street community is not especially pleased with the Internet behemoth’s stock performance over the past couple years. Of course, the fact that the stock remained stagnant during the same time period that Semel received more than $71 million in compensation might also have rubbed a few investors the wrong way.
Yahoo! is testing a new look on their search results page. The new look is a major departure from the current search results page. It’s sleek, clean and provides some additional features. Unfortunately, the new layout does not display the total search results. I hope Yahoo! is working on including it.
