We always had the habit of debating Google and Yahoo for a change now let us debate between Yahoo and MSN or Yahoo vs. the new Microsoft Bing Search engine. Primarily most of us will just conclude Yahoo is the much better compared to MSN. In most cases I agree with that when you see the below image from hit link it shows a clear trend where yahoo is well ahead than MSN.  Yahoo was once very dominant and was getting about 30% of search engine traffic. But as Google grew it made it very dominant and much stronger in some places in US market share of Google is well above 90%. 3 years back Yahoo results were powered by Google so virtually Yahoo’s market share is Google’s market share. Now they are an independent search engine and they power a lot of search engines. So I am sure Yahoo is a search engine here to stay. As a SEO company we monitor a lot of logs of our clients. In most cases we see consistent performances from Yahoo when rankings are similar in all top 3 search engines. So I see no point in comparing who is better Yahoo or MSN. But wait it’s not all over. After years of being an underdog Microsoft cant anymore to get back their search engine market share. They came down with a bang with the search engine called Bing. So did Bing work indeed yes? They excess advertising of Bing and the improved quality of results made Bing instant famous and already a hit. Bing as far as I tested has much better quality results than the MSN live search and MSN Global search. I am sure Bing is here to stay we need to see few more months whether they can steal any percentage of Market share from Google. It’s just 15 days from launch and too early to say whether they will be dominant. But there are early signs it will be a success story. Wall street Journal reports "The number of times people clicked on ads listed next to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) search results jumped about 8% in the week since the software giant released its newly revamped search engine, dubbed Bing, the world's largest search engine marketing firm said Thursday." http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090611-716373.html Bloomberg reports “Microsoft’s share rose to 11.1 percent in the June 2-6 period, Bing’s first week in operation, from 9.1 percent a week prior, ComScore said on its Web site. Average daily penetration among searchers, a measure of how many people are being reached by the product, rose to 15.5 percent from 13.8 percent.” http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a0xxEn3GGCd0 We never know what the future holds for search engines. I am sure there will be some real tough competitors for Google. Labels: Microsoft, MSN Live Search, Yahoo
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BOSS is currently offered to developers free of charge. In the near future (likely late Q2 2009), we plan to implement a fee structure for API use above a set threshold. BOSS will continue to offer free use of the API below a set daily threshold - up to 10,000 search queries per day depending on the type of API call. In addition, we plan to implement a service level agreement (SLA) in parallel with fees. We will announce firm timing and further details when we get closer to launch. When we implement fees, we also plan to offer developers the ability to make non-time sensitive API requests at a significantly reduced price. This "off-peak" option can be used for research and analysis efforts to support building search experiences and would allow developers to request queries to be fulfilled by BOSS when capacity permits. We currently plan to implement a fee system with the following structure: · Fees will be determined based on the number and type of API requests made per day · We are no longer restricting developers from monetizing their products using third-party platforms · Fees will be determined using a unit system · Units for Web, News, and Image BOSS API calls will be incurred based on the last result requested. For example, an API call requesting results 91-100 is the same cost as one requesting results 1-100 · Developers may request up to 1000 results in a single API call · Units will cost $.10 · Developers will receive 30 units per day for free of charge http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/fees.html Labels: Yahoo
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Yahoo has done a update to their index and I can see a lot of changes and shuffling of results for my client sites. Most of our client site rankings got boosted this time. Yahoo loves most of our client sites they sometimes act very weird when it come to ranking sites. Their ranking algorithm is the most difficult to rank as well as the most easy at times. There are sites we had been trying for months to rank in yahoo but none of the keywords are in first page but there are few sites which we just do work for a week and from 2nd week it tends to dominate for major keywords. According to official Yahoo search blog, Sharad Sharma reports that they have done a yahoo search index update and this will affect ranking and indexing of websites. Sharad also mentions they have updated their algorithm this time I am sure it's a minor changes because way I am seeing across most of our sites and client sites is that there is little or no movement and the few movement we see are all positive and upwards. http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/27/weather-report-yahoo-search-index-update-19/ According to Ysearchblog.com "We've rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We have had two updates since last November: one in December, 2008, and another in late January this year. We expect the update will be completed very soon. Throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index. While we didn't do Weather Reports for the December and January updates, we heard loud and clear that the community still finds them helpful, so we'll continue to provide these reports." I hope your sites are doing better. Good luck with update. Labels: Yahoo
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If you are website publisher, just like videos on the flickr’s new mobile site you will be able to use Yahoo’s video platform to convert your user’s uploaded clips into great looking, iPhone-ready video files. On Thursday, Yahoo launched an updated version of mobile website for Flickr with the ability to playback Flickr’s short, 90-second video on iPhone and iPod touch. Various other devices like mobiles will also be supported very soon. Videos on flickr’s mobile site are processed using Yahoo’s new video platform, which works on the backend to transcode uploaded videos into the high-quality H.264 format. There is also a web API for feeding Videos into transcoder and for collecting the results. After the demo session was held, some questions pass to the development team responsible for new video platform by flickr’s. Since the web API was being developed the various queries goes like this. Will the transcoder API be made publicly available to webapp creators so they can include video in their creations? What are the player software options developers have available to work with? Flickr in the browser is using flash now. The mobile site launches the quicktime player on iPhone. On the Nokia N-series it presumably launches the Nokia video player? Real players? What other Yahoo properties will take advantages of this new video platform? News? Movie trailers? TV.Yahoo.Com? Yahoo Developer Network Website will give details about the video platforms public availability. Labels: Yahoo
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The value of a Yahoo! Directory listing goes up as your site becomes more popular. On Yahoo.com, but not on its international counterparts, listings are sorted by popularity and, supposedly, relevance. In the past two months, I got 4 visitors from a listing halfway on page 3 of a category three levels deep. That's not too bad, especially considering that these are very targeted visitors with low bounce rates and an above-average number of pageviews per visitor. Admittedly, at 4 visitors every two months, or 24 per year, I am paying roughly $12.50 per click, and I am certainly not making that much per visitor to the site. Once Google Adsense statistics are included in Google Analytics, it will be interesting to see how valuable Yahoo! Directory traffic is for this particular site. The site has been growing steadily for the past half year, and it will be equally interesting to see the shift in traffic when the listing moves up to the first page of the category. If you compare it to the traffic increase seen when you move up on a search engine results page for a particular query, a page one listing could be quite valuable, but that will, of course, depend largely on the popularity of the category. A $300/month sponsor listing for the category would put me near the very top of the first page, which might be an interesting experiment if it weren't for all the scary reports of billing issues related to sponsor listings. Also, they would have to send me over 250 visitors per day for it to be directly worth the money, which does not seem very feasible. All in all, it depends too much on the category and on your position within that category, so there is no one answer to the question of whether or not it is worth to be listed in the Yahoo! Directory. If you have the money, find the appropriate category for your site and try to analyze it thoroughly before submitting. How many other listings and other types of links (e.g. sponsored listings and category links) does it contain? How many levels deep is it from the directory homepage? How many clicks does it take to get from the Directory homepage to your category? Some categories are linked directly from the Directory homepage. Will this link give my site an edge over my competitors? Consider the fact that you can cancel your listing after a year if it turns out not to be worth the money. Also note that there may be some other benefits tied to a directory listing, like increased trust in the eyes of particular search engines, as mentioned before. Hard to track, but worth considering. Labels: Yahoo
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I have many question me how to check the backlinks or links coming into their site in various search engines. Well i already wrote an article based on that here. http://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-strategies.htm this article isey a bit old but works great still. Today the top 3 search engines are more friendly to webmasters and are willing to share a percentage of what they know about your backlinks. 1. Google: Traditionally Google used to show most of the backlinks to a site ( link: ) but way back in 2002 they broke that comment and started showing backlinks only with PR 4 and above. Then later in 2005 they broke that too and started showing very less sometimes less than 2% of backlinks a site really possesses. This is had been the case for more than 2 years. But in 20o6 started a massive webmaster communication programme. They opened up something called Google sitemaps ( now called Google webmaster central ) . Later they capitalized on that and due to massive support they got from webmasters and now the webmaster tools shows a lot of data very useful for webmasters. One of that is the backlinks to a site/page/from inner pages etc. To check the backlinks what Google shows you need to first verify your website to prove you are the owner. Now we can check backlinks if we login to Google webmaster tools here. Once logged in and site verified: We go to Dashboard >> Links and we can check backlinks what Google shows. Remember even this is not accurate here google shows atleast 25% backlinks so you can count that what they are showing is somewhat correct. Yahoo: Yahoo is the only search engine who never hesitated to share their backlink data. In yahoo we can just use link:http:// to check for a single page or linkdomain: to check for an entire site. There are lot of ways you can check backlinks in yahoo especially filtering out sites. Please check those stuff here. http://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-strategies.htmMSN: MSN was showing backlink in link: command before a year but they broke the command and stopped showing all backlinks. Now they opened up communication and started http://webmaster.live.com/ where you can verify your site like Google and check backlinks. Its good to see search engines share more with webmasters in recent days i hope we see more from them in future. vijay Labels: MSN Live Search, Yahoo
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A webmaster world member complains about the domination of Yahoo answers. Yahoo answers a platform where users can ask questions and other experts in same field can answer the question. The person who asks the question has the option to decide which one is the relevant answer based on votes or by experience of the posting expert. Today Yahoo answers is the NO.1 site for getting solutions from experts. We have forums for all topics but Yahoo answers have provided a clean solution to problems. Sandy of webmasterworld asks "Since last few months we had been observing this.. hopefully others can clarify more. We used to get decent results from yahoo search engine to some topics on our site but lately yahoo answers is ranking on top results for same phrases and keywords today. No way to get on top ahead of yahoo answers now for those phrases " Well as with any search engine the quality of the domain and the internal linking plays a important role in search engine rankings. Yahoo answers have an excellent internal linking and they are bound to dominate the results if the contents are unique. I feel that is what he is saying. There is nothing much he can do to fight against yahoo answers. One way he can try is to improve the content quality of his site and get more stronger links. Yahoo answers loose value over a period of time and i am sure his site will be on top once the power of the Yahoo answers topic fades off. SEGLabels: Yahoo
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YAHOO ANOUNCES SETTLEMENT WITH CARL ICAHN Yahoo who is a leading global Internet company announced that it has reached an agreement with Carl Icahn to settle their pending proxy contest related to the Company's 2008 annual meeting of stockholders. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, eight members of Yahoo's current Board of Directors will stand for re-election at the 2008 annual meeting. In view of the settlement agreement with Mr. Icahn, and the termination of the proxy contest, Robert Kotick who is one of the board members has decided not to stand for re-election to the Board at the 2008 annual meeting & following 2008 annual meeting Yahoo board will be expanded to 11 members. Carl Icahn will be appointed to the Board. As part of the settlement agreement, Mr. Icahn, who owns an aggregate of 68,786,320 shares, or 4.98% of Yahoo common stock, has agreed to withdraw his nominees for consideration at the annual meeting and to vote his Yahoo shares in support of the Board's nominees. Yahoo chairman told that they are gratified to have reached this agreement, which serves the best interests of all Yahoo Stockholders. And they look forward to work productively with Carl and the new members of the Board in continuing to improve the Company's performance and enhancing stockholder value. Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang told that agreement will not only allow Yahoo to put the distraction of the proxy contest behind us, it will also allow the Company to continue pursuing its strategy of being the starting point for Internet users and a must buy for advertiser. Icahn is very pleased that this settlement will allow him to work in partnership with Yahoo's Board and management team to help the Company achieve its full potential. He believes that this is a good outcome and he'll have a strong working relationship going forward. He is also happy that the board has agreed in the settlement agreement that any meaningful transaction, including the strategy in dealing with that transaction, will be fully discussed with the entire board before any final decision is made. On the whole both the parties are ready for this agreement & yahoo being a world-class company with an extremely bright future, and collaborating together, I believe, the Company achieves its ambitious goals. Labels: Search engine directories, Yahoo
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Yahoo recently launched BOSS a new search service which helps to build your own search service. A web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search. It is a new platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API. It also allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!'s production searchinfrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences. SUMMARY: * Ability to re-rank and blend results -- BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!'s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience. * Total flexibility on presentation -- Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements. * BOSS Mashup Framework -- We're releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources * Web, news and image search -- At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we'll be adding more verticals soon. * Unlimited queries -- There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day. USE FOR ITS PARTNERS & YAHOO:Its open up to infrastructure and technology to developers, entrepreneurs and companies because boss believes that being open is core to Yahoo!'s future success, opening their network, opening their own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening their search infrastructure via BOSS. It will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!. For BOSS, there's a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow their audiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo!Second, we do see new revenue streams from BOSS. In the coming months, BOSS will be launching a monetization platform that will enable Yahoo! to expand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search. ADVANTAGE FOR ITS USERS: BOSS will enable a range of fundamentally different search experiences. These new search products will provide valueto users along multiple dimensions, such as vertical specialization, new relevance indicators and ranking models, and innovative UI implementations. FEW EXAMPLES OF WHATS POSSIBLE WITH BOSS:ME.DIUM-Medium is a start-up that's built an innovative collaborative browsing product used BOSS to build a web-scale searchengine that leverages its real-time surfing data. By combining the depth of the Yahoo! Search index with its insight into where users are browsing, Medium can provide its users with a unique buzz-based search experience. HAKIA-Its a semantic search start-up, which is using BOSS to access the Yahoo! Search index and dramatically increase the speed with which it can semantically analyze the web. With BOSS providing this important infrastructure, Hakia is ableto deliver a language search experience that isn't available from any of the "big three" search providers or other semantic search engines. DAYLIFE TO-GO-Its a new self-service, hosted publishing platform from Daylife. Anyone can use this platform to generate customizable pages and widgets. It uses the BOSS API platform to power its web search module. CLUUZ-This is a next-generation search engine prototype, generates easier-to-understand search results through semantic cluster graphs, image extraction and tag clouds. The Cluuz analysis is performed in real-time on results returned from the BOSS API. To learn more about BOSS and get started using the API, visit the Yahoo! Developer Network. BOSS is open to all. One can check out the documentation, get a BOSS app ID and start building the next generation of search!! Labels: search engines, Yahoo
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Yahoo has agreed that its ready to take the previous Microsoft offer of 33$ per share to take over the whole company. It also denied a recent joined proposal by Microsoft and Mr.Icahn to take ever just yahoo's search engine Business. Reason for denial " 1. Yahoo!'s existing business plus its recently signed commercial agreement with Google has superior financial value and less complexity and risk than the Microsoft/Icahn proposal. 2. The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would preclude a potential sale of all of Yahoo! for a full and fair price, including a control premium. 3. The major component of the overall value per share asserted by Microsoft/Icahn would be in Yahoo!'s remaining non-search businesses which would be overseen by Mr. Icahn's slate of directors, which has virtually no working knowledge of Yahoo!'s businesses. 4. The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would require the immediate replacement of the current Board and removal of the top management team at Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Board believes these moves would destabilize Yahoo! for the up to the one year it would take to gain regulatory approval for this deal." Board Decision:
"Yahoo! Board's conclusion that the current proposal is not in the best interests of stockholders is based on a number of factors, including: -- The revenue guarantees suggested, which are conditional and subject to reduction, are well below the search revenue that the Company is expected to generate on its own and in association with its announced commercial agreement with Google. That agreement alone is estimated to generate $250 to $450 million of incremental cash flow for the first twelve months following implementation, while allowing Yahoo! to remain a principal in paid search; -- The success of the remaining Company is critically dependent on Microsoft's ability to effectively monetize search; -- Microsoft/Icahn's proposed Traffic Acquisition Costs rates are below market; -- The proposal calls for Yahoo! to sell its industry-leading algorithmic search business and its related strategic and valuable intellectual property portfolio for no incremental consideration; and -- Many of the components of the headline value that Mr. Icahn and Microsoft put forward, such as the spin-off of the Yahoo!'s Asian assets and the return of cash to stockholders, are steps that could be taken by Yahoo! on its own and the Board continues to evaluate these options. Mr. Bostock concluded, "Microsoft and Mr. Icahn are trying to dismantle the Company and deliver our search business to Microsoft on terms that would be disadvantageous to Yahoo! stockholders. We are prepared to let our stockholders, not Microsoft and Carl Icahn, decide what is in their best interests and we look forward to the upcoming vote."" Search Engine Optimization Blog Team,
Labels: Other Search Information, Yahoo
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BLB&G LLB group is taking on Yahoo on behalf of some share holders for not accepting Microsoft bid. this page has some very useful information that's just revealed. On February 21, 2008, BLB&G, on behalf of Plaintiffs, filed a Class Action Complaint against Yahoo and its board of directors (the “Board”), alleging that they have acted to thwart a non-coercive takeover bid by Microsoft, which would provide a 62% premium over Yahoo’s pre-offer share price, and have instead approved improper defensive measures and pursued third party deals that would be destructive to shareholder value. Yahoo’s “Just Say No to Microsoft” approach is a result of resentment by the Board, and not any good faith focus on maximizing shareholder value. Microsoft attempted to initiate merger discussions in late 2006 and early 2007, but was rebuffed, supposedly so Yahoo's management could implement existing strategic plans. None of those initiatives improved Yahoo’s performance. On February 1, 2008, over a year after its initial approach, Microsoft returned, offering to acquire Yahoo for $31 per share, representing a 62% premium above the $19.18 closing price of its stock on January 31, 2008.Looks like the proxy fight is about to move forward more aggressively. Lets wait and see Labels: Microsoft, search engines, Yahoo
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