Yahoo has introduced thumbnail previews for its image searches. The new feature will allow searchers to quickly see the results of their searches and, if dissatisfied with the results, modify their searches accordingly.
Not to be outdone, Microsoft has released its own image search innovation this week. You can now use an image on Microsoft’s search engine, Live, to look for similar images online.
comScore’s expanded search query report for August indicates that YouTube, not Yahoo, is the second most popular ’search engine’.
In August 2008, web users conducted 2.5 billion searches on YouTube, compared with 2.4 billion on Yahoo.
Source: Miguel Helft, “Search Ads Come to YouTube”, The New York Times, October 13, 2008
Heads up for Yahoo search engine watchers. Yahoo is rolling out changes to its crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days.
According to Yahoo, we can expect to see some “ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.”
Source: Sharad Verma, “Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update”, Yahoo! Search Blog, September 9, 2008
Search Engine Watch reports that, according to analytics firm Covario, Yahoo ate into some of Google’s share of the paid search market in the second quarter ended June 30, 2008. Meanwhile, spending on paid search as a whole dropped from 52 percent to 43 percent in the same period.
Do we just take Covario’s word for it? Neither the Search Engine Watch article nor Covario actually tell us how much share Yahoo nabbed from Google. However, the finding IS consistent with AdGooroo’s claim that Google’s share of paid search slipped, while Yahoo’s marginally increased last quarter.
Who’s afraid of Google?
Microsoft buys Powerset (and is apparently still interested in buying Yahoo).
And now, in what appears to be another admission that it can’t beat Google on its own, Yahoo has decided to share its search technology and data centers with other companies. Known as “Boss” - or “build your own search service” - the strategy is aimed at letting other companies build on Yahoo’s technology in return for allowing Yahoo to sell advertising on those new search engines.
Yahoo has admitted that the new strategy could cannibalize its own search business, but believes that the initiative is more likely to erode Google’s much larger share of the search market. At least two start-up companies - Me.dium and Hakia - have already signed up to use Yahoo’s search technology.
AdGooroo’s latest search advertising market share report reveals that the market share leader is still Google, with a 76.6 percent share of all search advertisers, followed by Yahoo with a 31.9 percent share, and Microsoft in distant third with a 9.9 percent share.
Google’s share slipped by 6.4 percent between the first and second quarters of 2008, however, and is down 8.5 percent year-over-year. Yahoo’s share increased by 0.03 percent in the second quarter, and by 9.8 percent year-over-year. Microsoft, however, is clearly struggling to keep its advertisers, having lost a massive 20 percent of search advertisers in the second quarter, bringing its year-over-year decline to 6.7 percent.
Yahoo has finally pulled its previously freely accessible Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool from the Net.
If you visit inventory.overture.com you will now be permanently redirected to a landing page promoting Yahoo Search Marketing to small businesses. Of course, you can still access Yahoo’s keyword suggestions if you sign up as an advertiser on Yahoo’s search marketing platform.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable, “Yahoo Finally Kills Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool?”, June 27, 2008, Yahoo Search Engine Marketing
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