Pretty exciting day in search seeing Bing results live on Yahoo! Search results.
There were some questions as to what might transfer and what might stay. It seems that generally algorithmically there was roughly a 1 to 1 transfer.
Yahoo! is still showing fewer characters in their page titles than Bing does. Site links (listed below some sites) may also use different anchor text. But the core results are the same. The big exceptions to the concept of the 1:1 representation would be vertical search results, left rail navigation customizations & the inline search suggestions Bing does in their search results for popular search queries.
As I mentioned last month, on of the big stories at SES San Francisco is the Microsoft Yahoo! Search Alliance, aka MicroHoo.
Byron Gordon of SEO-PR, interviewed Tamara Colagrossi, Group Product Marketing Manager, Search, Microsoft, and Michael McMeekin, Senior Strategist Search Optimization & Strategy, Yahoo!, about the new Microsoft Yahoo search alliance while they were both at the event.
Yahoo is focusing on content indeed but it also remains committed to search, Senior VP of Search Shashi Seth told us during a conversation at the company’s premises in Sunnyvale.
Shift?
Many elements have been pointing recently to a shift in Yahoo’s strategy from search to content: the company acquired Associated Content, entered a deal with Nokia, went through a management reshuffle, including recently the departures of top search heads. And of course, there is the Search Alliance under which Microsoft’s Bing will power Yahoo’s search activities.
Yahoo is currently testing its “Infinite Browse” feature with a limited number of users. Infinite Browse literally comes in a box below Yahoo News and suggests images, videos, news articles, slideshows, as well as related searches.
The user thus stays on the same page (hello dwell time) and no longer has to go to a separate page to further his/her search. No wonder Yahoo claims that so far user engagement with the new module “is nearly twice the amount we see with similar features.” The company did not provide a timeframe for the full roll out of the feature but said it is part of its strategy to enhance and roll out “new search-powered features across the Yahoo! Network.” This includes the recently optimized “Trending Now” related-topics suggestions feature that Yahoo says has “more than doubled” click through rates.
An overview of some of today’s search, ad, tech news
Search
Adobe has filed for a patent that would enable search engines to crawl rich media format through an annotation-based system.
“According to embodiments of the invention, a developer annotates portions of the procedural code of a rich Internet application to facilitate exposing particular content to a search engine,” the patent filing reads. The patent would make Apple’s war against flash technology more difficult.
Google sites remained the most visited in the U.S. during the month of June but Yahoo is closing in on its rival, comScore’s numbers show.
Most Popular
Among the top five most popular web properties in the U.S., Google sites remained #1 with almost 179 million visitors in June. Yahoo edged ever closer with a mere 9 million lag, or 170 million visitors to its sites. Microsoft sites ranked third at 161 million visitors during the period. Facebook came in fourth at 141 million visitors, ahead of AOL sites at 107 million visitors. The most notable gains were those of Adobe properties, which went up 10 positions and ESPN, who won 12 spots as it benefited from traffic generated by the World Cup, comScore said.
Microsoft’s Greg Nelson and Yahoo’s Mark Morrissey recently gave interviews to Kara Swisher of AllThingsD. Nelson and Morrissey are in charge of a two-year effort to coordinate the massive search and online advertising partnership that their companies struck last year. According to Swisher, their job “essentially is the search equivalent of herding cats.”
So, if Nelson and Morrissey are out talking about creating a seamless search and online advertising product that works quickly and well across two major Web properties, I wonder what the gang from Bada Bing and Bada Hoo will be saying in a couple of weeks at SES San Francisco.
Search advertising spend is on the rise for small- and medium-sized businesses. In fact, that would be the understatement of the year: SMB ad spending in the second-quarter soared 159% from last year, according to a WebVisible report. What’s more is that Yahoo is pulling the dollars away from Google and Ask.
WebVisible, the provider of local online marketing products and services, published its second-quarter report on SMB paid search advertising showing a strong recovery from the same period a year ago.
Yahoo reported second-quarter earnings of $213 million, soaring 51% from $141 million a year earlier. However, revenues came in below expectations, hurt by one week slowdown in June, it said… Really?
Core figures
Second-quarter net profit amounted to 15 cents per share, up from 10 cents a year ago, and one cent above Wall Street analysts EPS forecast of 14 cents. Revenues for the company stood at $1.60 billion in the quarter, a soft 2% increase from $1.57 billion during the same period a year ago. However, the baseline (i.e. revenues excluding commissions paid to ad partners) in the end came in at $1.128 billion, compared to $1.14 billion last year, falling short of the $1.16 billion average forecast by analysts polled by Bloomberg. Total traffic acquisition costs rose to $473 million in the quarter from $436 in the second quarter of 2009.
Straight from the horse’s mouth:
We’ve started testing organic (also referred to as algorithmic) and paid search listings from Microsoft for up to 25 percent of Yahoo! Search traffic in the U.S. The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft. However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing.
