Kikabink News

Yahoo has released a new zip code targeting feature for Panama search advertisers that allows them to direct ads to searchers based on their zip codes.

The service comes with an interactive mapping interface that allows advertisers to specify cities and zip codes and is more precise that the geo-targeting feature in Google Adwords which is only city-specific.

Yahoo’s service - like Google’s geo-targeting feature in Google Adwords - is based on identifying a searcher’s IP address, as well as some other factors. As such, it’s not fool-proof and Yahoo notes that the accuracy of its geo-targeting is not guaranteed.

Currently, the service supports cities and zip codes in approximately 3,500 municipalities in the U.S and Canada.

Source: Zachary Rodgers, “Yahoo Adds Granularity to Local Search Ads”, The ClickZ Network, October 20, 2008

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

According to comScore, Google’s share of search engine usage rose to 63 percent in August. This compares to 61.9 percent in July.

Not surprisingly, Google took share as Yahoo and Microsoft lost share. Yahoo’s share of search dropped from 20.5 percent in July to 19.6 percent in August. Microsoft’s share dropped from 8.9 percent in July to 8.3 percent in August.

Source: Peter Kafka, “comScore August Report Card: Google Gaining, Of Course”, September 18, 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.

Source: Nathania Johnson, “Yahoo Snags Search Ad Marketshare Gain at Google’s Expense”, Search Engine Watch, August 11, 2008