Organic SEO Blog

Yahoo is taking the next step in its “open” strategy with the launch today of BOSS: Build your Own Search Service. The BOSS program will allow third parties to build their own search engine using Yahoo’s index and ranking methodologies as a base.

The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.

It’s a giant step beyond anything Google has done in open source. Google has released a ton of code, but not its search algorithm till now….

Sometime back, Yahoo raised its minimum bid from $0.05 to $.10, and those current bids under 5 and 10 cents, which its users had been using earlier were called Grandfather Bids and so on. And now, they are trying to follow Google’s policy of no minimum bids….. Following is the official notification from Y!

Starting in the next several weeks(we are not sure about ourselves), the minimum bids for a number of Sponsored Search keywords will no longer be fixed at $.10. Your new minimum bids can be lower or higher than $.10. Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at $.10(why so? and who used them?).

This update is intended to align your minimum bids with the value and quality of your keywords(just like google, we used to follow them always). It also is designed to help improve the overall search user experience by rewarding advertisers for better quality with lower entry points into keyword markets.

The amount set as your minimum bid on a keyword in Sponsored Search can vary depending on multiple factors, such as(blah blah blah):

• The relevance of your keywords (as measured by the quality of the ads associated with them)
• The number of bidders and bid amounts in the particular keyword market.

A keyword term becomes “active” — switched “on” in the system (again we are copying google as such) and eligible for display — when your bid is equal to or greater than your minimum bid. If your bid falls below your minimum, your keyword will not be displayed. You’ll be notified of such changes and will have some time to adjust your bid.

Yahoo is testing the integration of data from their Delicious social bookmarking site within its search results. A search in Yahoo will now show whether a page listed in its results is also in Delicious and how it has been tagged.

For the time being, some users will see the Delicious icon as part of their normal search results, which indicates the number of people who have bookmarked those pages along with the tags people have supplied.

Delicious search was always popular for searching when there is no response from other standard search engines. With the new features, it will surely maintain its popularity. During 2005, Yahoo! acquired Delicious, the social bookmarking service created by Joshua Schachter.

Can Yahoo Make Display Ads Work More Like Search? Yes; With SmartAds, Yahoo is tapping into user behavior to help advertisers target ads in a more personalized way.

For example, a Web user who has shown an interest in certain car models and who logged on from a computer in Los Angeles could receive an ad for that vehicle that combines information on their nearest dealership and a real-time feed of inventory levels

This SmartAds system includes new software from Yahoo that assembles the ads from information provided by the advertiser. Behavioral targeting has been the focus for the Internet giants, many of which have offered large sums for online advertising firms that help track Web users’ habits. This year, Google made a bid to purchase DoubleClick, Microsoft announced its plans to try to snap up aQuantive, and Yahoo bought Right Media.

In the latest report from comScore, Google has maintained its lead on other powerful search engines. According to the report, Google captured just over 50% of U.S. searches in May.

comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, recently released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines.  It reports that, in May 2007, Google Sites captured 50.7 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining one full share point from the previous month.  Yahoo! Sites maintained its second place ranking with 26.4 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (10.3 percent), Ask Network (5.0 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.6 percent).

Though many users have begun inputting their information directly into address bars, it is clear that most prefer to use their favorite search engines to find needed information. It is clear from these results that paid search is still a good option for online marketers. Paying for higher placement, utilizing search engine optimization to get organic search placements is a good way to increase traffic to websites.

A rumored deal might merge News Corp. owned MySpace with Internet portal Yahoo and could prove strategically beneficial to both companies. Earlier in 2005, Keith Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.) bought MySpace for $580 million, and since then the value of the site has grown significantly.
The Times reports that News Corporation has decided to swap MySpace with Yahoo in return for a 25 per cent stake in the enlarged group.

Microsoft is said to be willing to pay the heavy price it would cost to acquire Silicon Valley’s most successful Web portal, Yahoo! And this deal would do more good for Microsoft than anything else the company has done in its efforts to catch up to Google in that market. But an acquisition like this would be a monster deal for Microsoft. Even before getting to the potential integration challenges, Yahoo wouldn’t come cheap.

The renewed talks comes in amid growing threat by search engine and online advertising giant Google for both the companies. In fact, Google replaced Microsoft as the world’s top brand only last month.

Yahoo! Music and digital media entertainment firm Gracenote are to launch a service allowing Yahoo! customers free access to a lyrics database, making it the first mass-market web service to host such a service. Yahoo! customers can now search with partial lyrics on the Yahoo! Music search bar.

Just select “Lyrics” from the music search box and enter a part of the song you remember, say, “don’t know much about a science book.” Yahoo will then show you the artist (if found – their database contains hundreds of thousands of songs from the provider Gracenote, and misses some hits) and the relevant snippet. Click on it and you’ll then see the album cover, you can play a sample from the song, buy the music, and read the full lyrics.

Yahoo has launched an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator that is aptly named as Pipes. It will let ordinary web surfers organize information that is circulating on the internet into a custom made useful format. This content will be an interactive feed aggregator launched by yahoo available on its Yahoo Pipes website.

This is what Y! says about pipes…

Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant

A pipe creator wanted to link all the keywords on the NY Times homepages and make photos from the keywords. He linked a NY Times front page URL to the Flickr tags search, and voila, he got an output of all the pictures that were tagged with those keywords on the NY Times front-page. Users can also use ‘Pipes’ to combine products and locations to find a suitable match to suit their needs.

Yahoo is very ecstatic about this new concept and wants to go all guns blazing in the Web 2.0 arena, and this will take on major players like Google.

Yahoo embarks on a critical overhaul to its search engine starting today, although very few users will probably notice. But, in effect, Yahoo has left hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on the table, with major repercussions.

Search engine advertising is a major business that is expected to generate $8.3 billion in sales in 2007, according to eMarketer, and advertisers are increasingly flocking to it as a way to hawk their products to what is considered a highly receptive audience.

Unlike television commercials, search ads are tailored to an individual user’s interest. Advertisers can choose which search queries their messages appear next to. The more aligned with the product they sell, the better. However, on Yahoo the ads were too often off the mark, Yahoo executives acknowledge. The problem was with the formula the company used to determine ad placement.

Yahoo’s technology gave most- prominent placement to advertisers that were willing to pay the most. But it turned out that those ads were not necessarily the ones users clicked on. Either users did not trust the companies advertising, or their pitches had no appeal.

To correct the problem, Yahoo will start considering an ad’s past success in generating clicks, in addition to the amount advertisers are willing to pay. Advertisers that are willing to open their wallets wide will no longer be guaranteed top billing. The change starts in the United States on Monday and will be phased in overseas by the end of the year.