Yahoo reveals top searches of 2004, yahoo’s 2004 list of top search engine queries

Yahoo has made available the list of top queries performed in their search engine in the year 2004,

Check it out here,

http://tools.search.yahoo.com/top2004/

Top 10 Search Terms

1.American Idol

2.Paris Hilton

3.Jessica Simpson

4.Britney Spears

5.Harry Potter

6.WWE

7.Usher

8.NASCAR

9.NBA

10.NFL

forum users report index / home page missing in yahoo’s new update

Forum posters report their index pages missing in the most recent yahoo update, If you are a user who lost your index page it is worth posting in this thread and see what others say about this,

www.webmasterworld.com/forum35/2875-3-10.htm

Yahoo opens new research and development in chennai india

Seems good news for india, Yahoo seems to be starting R&D department in india,

News here,

Yahoo, HP to launch operations in Chennai,

Internet major Yahoo Inc and Hewlett Packard are in the process of setting

up their development centres in Chennai and will soon be launching their

operations, IT secretary of Tamil Nadu, Vivek Harinarain said in Chennai on

Thursday.

“Yahoo is currently in the process of setting up its

development centre and is expected to launch its operations on December 24. In

the next couple of months, Hewlett Packard will be starting its operations in

Chennai with a total headcount of around 500 and plans to take it to 1000 in the

next couple of years,” he said, while addressing a two-day conference on

‘Creating A New Generation Of Entrepreneurs.’

more here, www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=39692

Significant Yahoo Update! reported around the forums,

Significant Yahoo search results update was reported in various forums, Yahoo seem to have fixed the 301 issue now.

Check the active thread discussion in webmasterworld.com

www.webmasterworld.com/forum35/3009.htm

Yahoo Launches Video Search, yahoo search now introduces a new feature which enables people to search for videos

Yahoo has launched the new yahoo video search, where people can search for videos, This is what they say in their blog on how to make a video enter the yahoo video search engine,

When we started thinking about how to make it easier for anyone to expose video

and other rich media content, one of the first things we thought of was

podcasting and RSS. Podcasting uses RSS Enclosures to provide an audio file

along with a news item or blog posting in an RSS feed.

So rather than build

a completely new way to do this, we decided to see what it takes to make RSS

Enclosures work for video content as well: video enclosures. It’s not a new idea

but we think it’s one whose time has come.

At the most basic level, this is

just a matter of pointing to a video instead of an MP3 file.

Instead of

this:

You could use this:

For many publishers, that’s all

it takes. The beauty of this is that there’s existing infrastructure for

handling simple enclosures. Many RSS readers already consume enclosures just

fine.

In the very near future the Yahoo! Video Search crawler will support

indexing video enclosures in RSS feeds.

From yahoo Search blog here – www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000060.html

Yahoo to begin testing desktop search in January,

After their rivals google and msn launching desktop search, it seems yahoo is ready to jumpin too,

Yahoo is bound to launch its desktop search in the money of January, Reuteurs article says this,

Yahoo said on Thursday it will begin testing a free desktop search service in early January, following rivals hoping to extend the reach of wildly profitable search-related advertising.

Desktop search, which helps excavate information buried on computer hard drives, is seen as the next frontier in the booming search sector that has generated billions in revenues from ads generated by Web search queries.

More here, itweb.co.za/sections/internet/2004/0412130917.asp?S=Reuters&A=REU&O=FRGN

An Interview with Tim Converse – Interesting discussion with Tim of yahoo search posted in yahoo search blog

An interesting interview with with Tim Converse is posted in the yahoo search blog, It is an interesting insight into yahoo search worth the read check it out here in the yahoo search blog,

ysearchblog.com

An extract from the interview,

JQ: When it comes to fighting spam, there’s all kinds of software and many

people trying to stop spam attempts. With all of us trying to detect this, is

there a way to tell the search engines about it?

A: We get a lot of that

data on our own. We have a pretty large view and we’re approaching the spam

problem from a lot of different directions. But nobody should expect to see any

sudden change in spam just yet.

Take weblog comment spam, for example. Two

things will have to happen for comment spam attempts to decrease; one is that

spamming will have to not work for search engines and the second is that comment

spammers will have to realize it. (laughs). There could be a long lag there

where, even if every search engine totally nailed them, spammers could still

operate under the belief that it worked. What we can do from the search engine

point of view is make spam not help.

Yahoo reportedly settles trademark dispute with Geico

Yahoo has settled a trademark infringement lawsuit with auto insurer Geico, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times online, even as rival Google prepares to take the case to trial this month. Geico, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., sued the two Internet companies in federal court in May for allowing other insurance firms to buy ads that appear when people type “Geico” into an Internet search engine. The confidential settlement was reached Friday between Geico and the Overture Services division of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo, leaving Google as sole defendant in the case. Source: Market watch

Yahoo Manipulates their search results by hand editing by human reviewed editors

It seems yahoo is doing human review and editing to search results, They purposely make a site rank on top, This was pointed out by Danny sullivan on searchenginewatch.com in this thread, this is what he posted,

In short, for some queries, some sites that came up had a special code
that seemed to indicate they may be hardcoded to rank tops for that query. I’ve
highlighted that below:
rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=ca…R=1/SS=2044565/H=1/IPC=gb/SHE=0/SIG=10pe5sku9/*-http%3A//www.cars.com/

That’s the redirect code for Cars.com, listed tops at Yahoo in a query on cars. H=1 seems to indicate the site was
hardcoded to show up in response to this query. In contrast, H=0 means no
hardcoding appears to be involved. As for this hiring, I’m with others that
posted. This isn’t some push to build human spam hunters. They’ve already got
those. It looks like they want to increase the quality of results, and perhaps
in particular for cases where those results may be in non-English languages.
Spam elimination is part of that, but not the entire part.

It is very interesting and a bit worrying for many SEOs, you can read the whole posting of danny sullivan here,

forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=2976

Thanksgiving logos Google Yahoo Askjeeves logo changed for thanksgiving day

Google yahoo askjeeves changed their logos on the thanksgiving day to pay tribute to everyone celebrating it,

There are the following logos displayed on the thanksgiving day,