Is Microsoft indirectly going for a Proxy fight?

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

Yahoo index update May 2008 – Yahoo search engine algorithm and ranking update

Yahoo has made some changes to its algorithm and ranking factors. Yahoo calls its index update a weather update and Yahoo Weather updates are posted in the their Official blog by some Search Engineer.

Priyank Garg & Sharad Verma both from Search had posted an update here

“We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. “

Hilarious image of yahoo’s bragging on Petabyte database

Yahoo’s bragging about their new improvement in database size of their petabyte database. Its a very cute image designed by our designer with great inside knowledge in SEO,

Yahoo’s petabyte database cartoon

Delicious IE extension a useful tool for IE / Delicious users

Internet explorer delicious users now have a new reason to smile. Del.icio.us has released a very neat extension for IE with some useful features.

IE features.
Near instantaneous searching with very large accounts (over 10K bookmarks)
Full del.icio.us sidebar and toolbar implementation with bookmark sync and typedown search
Toolbar indicators for new network activity and links for you
Works on IE6, IE7, and IE8 beta on both XP and Vista

From the day Yahoo acquired Del.icio.s this social bookmarking site has some sparkling features. Though i prefer Digg over delicious i feel delicious stands out better than Digg in features like this. Interested? Download it here.

Way to Go,

SEG

Yahoo’s Petabyte index – Bigger is not always better

Yahoo breaches the petabyte mark. Yahoo’s VP for data Mr.Wagan announced that yahoo has crossed the petabyte mark of the Search Index. Google in 2005 announced their data is 3 times more than Yahoo’s but after that they went into silence and started discussing on search quality.

Now Yahoo has bragged again that they now have the capacity to store 10s of petabytes of data and is ready for the coming future.

For anyone who don’t know what a Petabyte is it 1024 Terabytes and 1 terabyte is equal to 1024 gigabytes.

To tell in simple terms imagine you have an image on your website that is 50 KB then yahoo has data equivalent of 20,000,000,000 images that you have on your site. Or the current data cluster of Yahoo data equivalent of 20 billion 50 KB images.

To read more on Yahoo’s Bragging go here . Though yahoo claim to have a huge index i am sure Google will have much bigger index than Yahoo. I feel due to the competition between these two rivals soon we might expect an announcement from Google about their index capabilities.

Yahoo Mcafee join hands to pick out spammers in search results

Yahoo has tied hands with Mcafee to pick spammers from search results and warn innocent searches from potential problem they might face visiting a website. If you see the following screen shot

You can see the warning display from Yahoo search results. The site featuring in search seem to be an email spammer. Emails submitted to that site are added to some bulk email lists and results in 1000s of spam to those email IDs. Now Yahoo includes a warning to remove these potential spammers. The note says “Use caution in providing your email address. It may result in unsolicited or spammy emails” The site featuring here is carbonneutral.com a potential email spammer according to Yahoo and Mcafee.

There will be some innocent occurrences of this where sites may get flagged for sending unsolicited email whereas the people who reported the email as spam had actually elected to receive it. But this is rare most of the time email spammers are spammers regardless of whether they are guilty or Not.

Microsoft’s Lost Love with Yahoo – A Contemporary version

Higher traffic from Yahoo after latest yahoo update.

We are experiencing quite a significant amount of increase in traffic from yahoo search engine after yahoo made an update before 10 days. Yahoo Search Engine recently updated their algorithm and this made lot of sites shuffle in their rankings. Some sites lost rankings some gained we gained very good ranking for our site and now yahoo accounts for about 15% compared to Google. We probably got good boost in Yahoo Search Rankings. We used to get only 3 or 4% of traffic from Yahoo now it has increased significantly

We are happy that yahoo still have a good market share in search

Yahoo Search Index rankings algorithm update

Yahoo recently updates their algorithm and search engine rankings. They made major changes as reported in their blog http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000533.html . Update was reported on April 21st and it should be rolled out by now. We did notify some significant changes from our client sites as well as our sites so did you see it?

How was your site performance?

Yahoo team’s up with you vlingo for Mobile voice search

Mobile voice search is about to be introduced in Yahoo where a user can search for information using him Mobile phone just by using his voice.

According to Marco Boerries, an executive vice president for Vlingo said people using BlackBerry Curves, Pearls or the 8800 series can use their voice over the phone to search the web. Yahoo’s Mobile search engine is called Onesearch and has been in Industry for a while.

As per expert’s reviews Vlingo’s voice recognition is the best of its kind in industry. Though Still it has no where reached a level comparing with real human voice still its competiting strongly.