The unveiling of the Yahoo! Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) may spur an influx of new search engines. Although start-up of a search engine is costly and time consuming, BOSS gives developers a head start with the ability to access Yahoo!’s search results and customize the rest.
Google was recently the center of negative attention when it was brought to the publics’ attention that they did not have a link to their Privacy Policy readily available from their homepage. Yahoo! and MSN both implemented the policy on their respective homepages and in an attempt to ride the wave, Ask.com has recently added a link as well.
The local search marketplace continues to grow rapidly. Local is growing at a faster percentage rate than general search. Additionally, changes in search patterns show that consumers are becoming better and smarter searchers, moving from simple one- and two-keyword searches to more specific four- and five-keyword searches.
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Today’s New York Times discusses a declining online advertising industry and credits the economic downturn for the industries woes. The article cites the following statistics:
While banner investments on ad networks have declined, search engine marketing appeared unaffected. Google’s revenue in the United States was up thirty percent from last year, while Microsoft’s and Yahoo!’s online revenue jumped 29 and 9 percent respectively. A majority of search engine revenue comes from search advertising.
Yahoo! appears to be heading in the right direction when it comes to regaining market share from Google. They have taken their Advanced Search setting a step further and have now developed Personalized Search. The Personalized Search collects information about a searcher’s interests from their search history, browsing history, and interests listed in profiles from websites such as MySpace and other social networks. In doing so, it eases the users experience by narrowing the searches.
Yahoo! recently paired with McAfee security solutions to launch a new feature called “SearchScan”. Some of the new features included are “always-on” alerts and identify sites with bad e-mail practices. The deal signed is for multiple years and Yahoo! is hoping it will help minimize the gap with Google over that time period.
On Saturday, Microsoft withdrew its bid to takeover Yahoo!. CEO Steven Ballmer stated that the reason for Microsoft backing off from acquiring the company was the concern that Yahoo! would take action to make the company undesirable to Microsoft. One concern in particular was Yahoo!’s partnership to test Google’s search ads on its own search results pages.