search marketing blog: ambergreen

Yahoo! has announced that it is to reorganise into three major operating groups and will lose Dan Rosensweig, its chief operating officer, at the end of March according to a press release.

Yahoo! has had a bit of a bumpy ride of late, and while successes such as Yahoo! Answers and partnerships with the likes of Reuters may give main rival Google a run for its money, a leaked memo from Brad Garlinghouse, one of Yahoo’s senior V.Ps, indicated that things weren’t quite working smoothly behind closed doors.

According to Garlinghouse a radical reorganisation of the company was required to focus the company’s assets and restore accountability, and it seems that a major shake up is now underway.

The press release opens saying;

“Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, today announced a reorganization of its structure and management to align its operations with its key customer segments — audiences, advertisers and publishers — and more effectively leverage Yahoo!’s significant strengths to capture future opportunities for growth.”

According to Terry Semel, chairman and CEO, Yahoo! is entering its third phase in which focus rest on customers, a change which will allow Yahoo! to adapt to the evolution of the competitive and advertising landscapes and capture future growth opportunities.

Whether the upheaval will present Google with a more focused competitor remains to be seen, but it hints at interesting times to come. What do you think?

Yahoo and Reuters are inviting the public to contribute to news events by providing eye witness photos and videos to ‘You Witness’, a news contribution system designed to edit and distribute users news images to outlets across the world.

Available from tomorrow, users will be able to upload photos to Yahoo’s ‘You Witness’ site and contribute to the growing number of amateur journalism pieces being used by various media outlets.

Following images of the South Asian tsunami, the London Underground bombings and other major news events worldwide, the use of amateur photography and videos has grown, as members of the public in the wrong place at the wrong time beat journalists to the top stories.

Yahoo plans to run some of the chosen images as part of news packages on Yahoo News, which currently offers information from professional news organisations worldwide, including CNN, Associated Press and Reuters.

Scott Moore, head of news and information at Yahoo Media Group said that the move was a step in the right direction for journalists and the public; “There is already a lot of quality amateur journalism being created by our users. Yahoo needed a more efficient process for soliciting and publishing user- contributed photos and video.”

Contributors may be compensated when their images are selected for commercial syndication, although the two partners are still working out the details.

Yahoo have gone ahead with their planned change to the Sponsored Search Manage Bids page, designed to ensure that all advertisers have equal access to the same relevant bidding information, the changes mean that Yahoo no longer .

According to Yahoo, some of the information on the Manage Bids page will no longer be available in early December. The “Top 5 Max Bids,” “Position” and “Your Cost” columns from the current account interface will be removed, as well as the View Bids tool to make way for two new columns of information;

Estimated Average Position
an estimate of the average position, based on your bid and the current bids of other advertisers.

Bid Range for Top Positions
the current range of bids other advertisers are willing to pay for top positions

The more Google like bidding system will take into account your bid, on site content and click through rates to rank adverts.

Yahoo explained the reasons for the change saying;

“We are making this change in order to provide advertisers who have not yet upgraded to the new Sponsored Search with accurate bidding information.

As you may know, we’ve begun inviting U.S. advertisers to upgrade their accounts to the new Sponsored Search and invitations will continue to be sent in stages to U.S. advertisers over the remainder of the year and early next year. Given the way bid information is currently displayed, as advertisers upgrade to the new Sponsored Search, their bids would no longer be visible in the current system. By making this change, we are able to provide all advertisers with consistent and accurate bidding information, regardless of whether they have upgraded their accounts yet or not.”

For more information check Yahoo’s FAQs page.

While Google snaps up companies left right and centre and constantly innovates online, it has taken a strange move with Google Answers. From the start of next year the site will no longer accept questions, although it will stay open to allow users to search old Q&As from it’s archive.

With the recent success Yahoo! has had with Yahoo! Answers, this seems like a strange move, albeit one which opens up Google’s time and manpower to concentrate on other areas of the ever expanding business. Google Answers was never one of the most successful areas of the business, and at four years old, it would have been a hit before now if it ever had a chance. But traffic figures had been low and with free services competing against it, charging users for the service was always going to be difficult.

Yahoo! Answers continues to rack up the traffic, and the buzz at the site hasn’t really dropped since its launch, making Google’s poor Answers interface and service look old and tired. Yahoo! is obviously pleased with its product and integration of its Answers into Answers.com and integration of results into search results show that the company is looking at this product in the long term. With quality questions on the front page such as “Are people honking their car horns less frequently now?” and “Anyone unhappy about their embalming tutor and why?” to read, I know that Yahoo! Answers is going to keep me hooked for some time to come. Let’s see what, or if, Google have up their sleeve to counteract this type of random genius.

Answers.com has announced that they have integrated Yahoo! Answers results straight into their content, pulling keyword matches results from the Yahoo! site.

Keyword matches are returned from Answers.com in the usual fashion, with Yahoo! Answers results contained in a right hand box containing related questions and answers from the internet’s largest Q&A site.

With over 60 million users worldwide, Yahoo! answers provides a fantastic supplementary resource for answers.com, with reams of community generated questions and answers on every topic imaginable, and some that aren’t.   According to answers.com the partnership gives users the opportunity to connect reference information with real life experience and enrich the search process.

A search for ‘grapes’ (random, I know, it just popped into my head) returned dictionary, Wikipedia and nutritional information as well as a host of food site results, wine lovers data and various translations, not bad for a one word search.  The Yahoo! Answers box allowed me to view Q&A relating to the types of spiders found in boxes of grapes, substituting sweets for grapes to aid weight loss and The Grapes of Wrath.  Real life experiences indeed, and an interesting addition to some highly relevant search results.

Bob Rosenschein, CEO of Answers.com, explained the deal saying; “The phenomenon of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ has taken on extraordinary momentum, as evidenced by the meteoric growth of Yahoo! Answers.

“While our existing content is incredibly rich, relevant and cross-disciplinary, answers drawn from a community Q&A site provide a flip side - the dynamic, interactive voice of the people. User-generated content is a powerful wave on the internet and is a direction that we will continue to actively pursue.”

Answers.com are moving towards providing a dynamic search experience and as the notion of the online community grows, this can only be of benefit to the search engine.

Yahoo has signed a deal with seven US newspaper groups which will see the companies share local news content from 176 daily publications, boosting Yahoo!’s local reach, whilst giving the newspapers the ability to publish classified ads on it’s network of sites, whereby providing them with national exposure.

According to the New York Times the main goal of the deal is the optimisation and inclusion of local news within Yahoo! News, one of the webs most popular online new resources.

In August this year Outsell, the US analyst group warned that US newspaper groups could face a $20 billion shortfall in the next five years as readers stop buying newspaper and switch to finding their news online.

Declining circulation, along with falling revenues in print advertising and the growth of online news outlets would cause huge problems for the industry.

The new deal is expected to offset some of the circulation and advertising revenue problems, and although the newspaper groups’ online ad earnings are not expected to grow fast enough to replace lost print ad revenue, the newspaper business faces an unprecedented transformation which is likely to see increased co-operation between on and offline media channels.

A rather interesting and critical internal memo has appeared out of Yahoo! HQ, supposedly from the pen of Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior V.P.

It makes some really significant points regarding Yahoo! recent acquisitions, internal politics and staffing, saying that focus must be regained, accountability and clarity of ownership restored and a radical reorganization of the company be undertaken.

No doubt this has put the wind up some employees and share holders, but it can surely only be positive; Yahoo! has bought so many competing companies recently that it is fighting against itself, and according to Garlinghouse key staff have jumped ship leaving behind a mess of bureaucracy, unaccountability and a lack of passion.

It’s all pretty damning stuff and should this be taken to heart, as I’m sure anyone worth their salt in the upper echelons of Yahoo! would feel compelled to do, then we are in for a Yahoo! rather different from the one we know today.

It is the same old story of a company expanding quickly and trying to be all things to all people. At least Garlinghouse has had the guts to tell it like he sees it, no matter how difficult the coming months might be.

What do you think? Straight down the line tough talking or shameless self promotion?

Google, MSN and Yahoo! have teamed up to support Sitemaps, a free open source software tool which allows webmasters to make their site more accessible to search engines.

Sitemaps will allow a catalogue of pages to be created in the form of an XML file listing URLs along with additional metadata, and will also inform spiders of content updates and newly added pages.

This is an interesting development and an unusual one to report on! It’s not every day that you can say that Google, Yahoo! and MSN all back the same development, but better indexing can only be good for the web and it’s good to see the search giants put their weight behind such a project – it can’t be too long until everyone else joins in.

Have a look at the interview from PubCon where the announcement was made.

Both Google and Yahoo!’s share of the search market continues to grow, with the former driving 78% of referrals in the four weeks to 21st October 2006, up 9% on 2005’s figures for the same period according to new stats published by Hitwise.

As Yahoo! retains second place with 7.7% of the market, Hitwise revealed that the share of referrals from search engines to e-commerce sites has grown.

VP of Research Heather Hopkins said: “Google and Yahoo! Search in particular are seeing strong growth in their share of the UK search market and their share of referrals to online retailers. Growth for these search engines seems to be organic, driven in part by toolbar usage but also growing familiarity with the Google and Yahoo! brands.”

In fine time to help us all spend as much money as humanly possible, Yahoo! has launched a range of new features on Yahoo! Shopping. Having had a bit of a face lift the site is looking good, and with features such as the new Bargain Centre, buying guides and integrated Yahoo! Answers section, the site is geared to make the Christmas shopping experience as easy as possible.

Sadly this updated version of the site is US only at the moment, with the UK version, Kelkoo shopping on Yahoo!, offering users the usual interface. Fingers crossed that the new features are brought to the UK soon.