A collection of links, facts, etc. related to Yahoo.
General resources
- Yahoo! Press Room
- Yahoo News Alerts
- Yahoo Search Help
- Videos on how to use the new Search Assist
- Blogs: Yahoo Search Blog, Yodel Anecdotal, Yahoo Posts at Download Squad
- Yodel Anecdotal – Product Pulse RSS Feed
News
- Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network Yahoo! is now attempting to combat the presence of MySpace and \Facebook by revamping its e-mail system and personalized home page (MyYahoo) to include social networking. Yahoo’s “Inbox 2.0” will make mail more personal by displaying the messages from your important network of people more prominently, having links to personal profile pages, and access to updated information similar to Facebook’s News Feed. Yahoo! also plans to increase the amount of widgets that focus on social networking.
- Yahoo Announces Change To Shorter Descriptions According to blog from searchenginewatch.com, Yahoo! will enforce a 75-character limit for all of their ads beginning in late November for streamlining and readability purposes. Previously, Yahoo! allowed more than 75 characters, but only showed 75. Starting in late November, however, only 75 characters will be allowed.
- Yahoo! Launches New Program to Advance Open-Source Software for Internet Computing Yahoo! announced that it will launch a program to promote Open Source development and research. They plan on providing the academic community access to Hadoop, “an open source distributed computing sub-project of the Apache Software Foundation,” and to their supercomputing cluster the M45. Carnegie Mellon University will be the first university to try the program.
- ’’Citizen 2.0’’ Will Impact 2008 Election, According to New Study From Yahoo!, HCD Research, and Hall and Partners With the 2008 national elections approaching, Yahoo! has conducted research on the growing population of voters – dubbed “Citizen 2.0” – who utilize the internet to express their political opinions and how they are influencing the political landscape. Yahoo! plans on presenting this information at “its first ever political summit in Washington, D.C.” to illustrate to politicians the importance of expanding their stake in internet campaigning/advertising. Yahoo! has already been working on online advertising programs with Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.
- Yahoo announces Fireeagle Arrington at Techcrunch reported that Yahoo is announcing fireeagle, which is a new service for obtaining geo-location information, storing it, and making it available to other web applications. This is a technology coming out of Yahoo Brickhouse, a semi-autonomous Yahoo group focused on new product development. By not using IP addresses to track locations of users, Yahoo search can help users find more relevant results.
- Yahoo General Counsel: We’ll Consider Settling Yu Ling Lawsuit Foreign Affairs Committee member Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., recently sponsored a bill that would among other things make it illegal for US tech companies to divulge identifying user information to repressive regimes, and allow affected parties to bring civil suits against such companies in the United States. Also, Yahoo share prices have begun to flucuate as a result of this story (dropped 2% on this day).
- Yahoo Expands in Champaign, Illinois, Yahoo didn’t have any employees in Champaign, but when Motorola closed their data site in the city, Yahoo jumped at the chance and hired over 110 former Motorola employees. These employees have been staying in a local country club during training, but Yahoo plans to open a new office and even hire 30 interns for the upcoming year.
- Change In Yahoo Rankings Yahoo team says, “Over the last few days, we’ve been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.”
- Yahoo Looks to Create a Social Glue Kremer, the vice president in charge of Yahoo Mail in an interview with Priyanka Joshi discussed the company’s plans for the future, and said, “Our ambition is not to make a standalone social network to compete with the Facebooks and My Spaces of the online world. Instead, photo management, blogging and private communication will be offloaded on to Yahoo’s web tools like mail. Imagine a layer on top of our various web services, tying them together with a social glue.”
- Yahoo Messenger gets slicker is launching a new version of its popular Yahoo Messenger on Tuesday that lets you forward phone calls and instant messages and watch videos and view photos with friends, among other enhancements. But probably the most popular thing will be the new emoticons. Yahoo Messenger 9.0 has a redesigned interface with new “skin” background designs and new emoticons for expressions like “thumbs up,” “thumbs down,” and “rock on.”
- Bush Administration Might Weigh in on Yahoo Human Rights Case Ling, the wife of imprisoned online pro-democracy activist and writer Wang Xiaoning, first filed suit against Yahoo in U.S. district court here in Northern California this April. Yu wants to hold Yahoo civilly liable under United States and international law for abiding by Chinese law and providing government authorities with her husband’s personally-identifiable information. Wang had been using an anonymous e-mail account to participate in a Yahoo Group to disseminate his political views. He advocated open elections, a multi-party system, and separation of powers within the government. In addition, he called the Chinese government despotic. After obtaining the identifying information from Yahoo, the authorities arrested Wang and in late 2003 sentenced him to 10 years in prison.”
- Yahoo Stocks Surge Ahead of Alibaba IPO Pricing in Yahoo Inc surged as much as 8.5 percent late in the trading session on Friday on expectations it will benefit from huge demand for a public offering by Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba.com Ltd. Internet media company Yahoo is buying 10 percent of the share sale by Alibaba.com Ltd, and already has a 40 percent stake in the company’s parent, Alibaba Group. Alibaba.com’s initial public offering was expected to price at the top of its range after attracting more than US$180 billion in orders from institutional investors. It is scheduled to price on October 27 and begin trading in Hong Kong on November 6.
- Yahoo Opening Up Home Page to Outside Sourches is changing its home page to add links to outside sites for the first time as part of its move toward more openness and focus on being the front door to the Internet for most people.
The company “turned on” its new main page to the general public on Thursday. It looks the same, except the items in the Featured section in the center of the page now include links to news and other items located on outside sites. The items are chosen by editors.”
- Yahoo! Assits! Searches! article discusses Yahoo’s new search feature they just rolled out in an attempt to better compete with Google. This new feature provides a scroll down the provides a possible range of queries. Yahoo hopes this will help find more specific and relevant results. This feature is called “Search Assistant.”
- Wall St: Yahoo! Promises to Do Better, Admits Mistakes Yang admits that the company made of made a mistake by focusing on keeping customers on their site. He admits that users don’t use Yahoo like they used to (all inclusive site), but now use it to find other sites. As a result, Yang admits that Yahoo needs to focus on being a platform for users, and thus be able to track where they go and therefore sell targeted advertising to marketers.”
- Yahoo: No Plan to Copy Facebook Yahoo recently put in a bid of 1 billion dollars for facebook (Wall Street now estimates it’s worth at least 10 billion), CEO Jerry Yang has announced that the company plans to go in a different direction. He commented that Yahoo has reached “It’s sweet spot.”
- Woo-hoo for Yahoo! and Yang: “Although profits were down at Yahoo for its third quarter results, the profit fall was smaller than the one projected by analysts. This was a huge success for Yahoo, and its stock surged by 10% in after-hours trading following the good news. With sales and profits beating analysts expectations, Yahoo’s new CEO Jerry Yang, is shining and trying to update Yahoo’s strategy. In particular, he wants to link more tools to the Yahoo Homepage, gain more adverising revenues, and open up Yahoo applications to outside web developers.”
- Yahoo Newspaper Consortium: Harmful Or Helpful?: “Although joining the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium is supposed to be a must for newspapers looking to increase their number of subscribers, many newspaper publishers are having second thoughts about joining th consortium. The consortium allows them to advertise on Yahoo Pages; however, this may not be the best option for these newspapers. First, they do not know how long they will be locked into a deal with Yahoo. Second, partnering with Yahoo may mean forgoing the opportunities to team up with online social networks like Facebook and My Space.”
- Yahoo! Hosts ‘Hack Day’ in India: “100 Web developers came to the Yahoo Open Hack Day event. They worked for twenty four hours to create new software for Yahoo using the company’s programming interfaces. This was the third hack day Yahoo has hosted in the past year. The first and second were in the US and London respectively. At the the end of the hack day (Thursday, October 11, 2007), Yahoo gave out awards to some of the best new applications that Hack day participants developed. For instance, the “Brainiest Hack” award went to a widget called Yahealer that allowed doctors to collaborate and share medical files and photos online.”
- Confirmed: Yahoo expanding to Microsoft’s backyard: “Yahoo has signed a lease for 115,000 square feet in an office building in downtown Seattle. Seattle has long been known as a Microsoft dominant city because Microsoft is headquartered there. Yahoo may be trying to position itself with this new office to recruit Microsoft employees.”
- Yahoo tackles Google over DoubleClick purchase: “Yahoo has joined Microsoft in protesting the $3.1 billion Google buyout of Double Click. On October 14, 2007, Yahoo complained to the European Commission that Google’s moves in the advertising industry will reduce competition and drive up advertising prices. At the end of October, the European Commission will reveal whether it will have a three month formal inquiry on Google’s acquisition.”
- Yahoo! taps First Rate ad network: “First Rate’s The Performance Network (TPN) distributes ads to websites in Australia and in New Zealand. To increase the market reach and distribution of sponsored listings and business ads listed on Yahoo Search Marketing, Yahoo has agreed to pay First Rate some advertising revenue in exchange for filling any of First Rate’s spare inventory with text ads for companies listed by Yahoo.”
- The Other Half of the Search Equation: “A search company’s mandate is clear: help people find exactly what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. For well over a decade, search companies have taken the approach of focusing almost all of their efforts on making their engines smarter, with better indexes, better ranking and faster servers. While these are all hugely important efforts, making the engine smarter is only half of the equation. The other half of the search equation is making the query smarter—and this was our focus in the design and development of Yahoo! Search Assist.”
- 10/9)Yahoo! Pipes Brings Mashups to the Masses: “I thought this was a particularly interesting article because it deals with RSS feeds. Apparently Yahoo is attempted to differentiate themselves from competitors like Google by offering a new feature called Yahoo Pipes. This feature is for a bit of a more technical user, but it provides a program for users to “mash” their feeds. By using this program (which doesn’t require a high amount of programming…more of a drag and drop system), users “mash” their several different RSS feeds into one.
- 10/8)Yahoo’s 100 Day Review: “When Yahoo’s new CEO Jerry Yang took over about 84 days ago, he promised to conduct a 100 day review process to decide on Yahoo’s best opportunites going forward. Although there is a little over 2 weeks left on this process, Yahoo has made some adjustments that mean there will probably be very few suprises in the next few weeks. Foremost, Yahoo has made it clear that they don’t plan on giving up on their search function. They recently released a new version and also made significant advancements in their local search capabilites. Second, the company has recently begun a social networking feature that they hope will compete with myspace.com and facebook. Third, the company recently purchased Zimbra which was their first real big move into open source software. Zimbra provides an email/calender type feature, but also provides a program similar to Google’s Office feature. The main point of this article is that although Wall Street continues to scream for Yahoo’s breakup, CEO Jerry Yang seems determined to change and develop the company from within.
- 10/7)Yahoo! and eBay Join Forces Against Phishing: “Yahoo has recently developed a program named Domain Keys in order to reduce the amount of phishing (fake emails trying to get sensitive information) that takes place in Yahoo email accounts. Ebay and Paypal also added their support in this project. Yahoo users should notice throughout the next several weeks a gradual decline in the amount of phishing emails.
- 10/6) Major Internet Hubs See Lesser Influence: “Major Internet Hubs (especially Yahoo) are having trouble keeping their users on their site for extended periods of time. As a result, companies like Yahoo are losing negotiating power with advertisers. To adjust for this, major internet hubs are spending a significant amount of assets in order to branch out from their original site. For example, Google bought Youtube.com and Yahoo recently bought Flickr (a photo sharing site). By branching out, companies such as Yahoo are able to reach out to more internet users, and thus make themselves more attractive to advertisers.
- 10/5)The Big News About Yahoo!: “Although Yahoo just missed an earnings estimate, there is still some good news for the company as the continue to compete with powerhouse Google. Over the past two years, Yahoo has quietly solidified its position as the No. 1 provider of general, financial and sports news on the Internet. Two out of every five people who use Yahoo look at its news, finance and sports sites—50 million people every month, according to Internet tracking firm Com Score. That’s more than even the news service of Google. Yahoo accomplishes this by researching what consumers want to see (through online hits, search queries, and news stories that were sent through email). Yahoo found that consumers want to see celebrity/entertainment news, and when combined with Yahoo’s ability to allow the consumer to customize their homepage to such a high extent, a powerful news tool is created.
- 10/5) Yahoo Worth More if Broken Up: “An analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein believes that if broken up, the value of a Yahoo share could be worth $39 (currently at roughly $27). The analyst believes Yahoo should either break the company up, or begin a complete overhaul including 25% less employees, outsourcing its paid search feature, and restructuring its graphic display advertising. This analyst put a “market perform” rating on the stock as he believes Yahoo is not capable of challenging Google and he also believes Yahoo’s email function is going to face a lot stronger competition in the future.
- Launch Party at the ‘Search Bar’: “Here are a few photos taken at yesterday’s internal launch party for the new Yahoo! Search. After many sleepless nights, it’s great to see some of the positive reactions from users. Now that we’ve had a few celebratory drinks—the Yahootini was quite popular—we’re back to working on more new features and improvements.” Check out the tablecloth.
- From ‘To Do’ to ‘Done’ in one search: “In July Yahoo launched its real-time query suggestion tool in July. Yahoo! Search Assist kicks it up a notch, bringing those suggestions to the search results page, along with related concepts that give users a point-and-click query refinement capability that enables them to explore a subject area they may be unfamiliar with.”
- Yahoo closes Podcast search: “After opening two years ago, Yahoo will close it Podcast search on October 31st 2007. Even though the company apologizes it doesn’t provide any reason for closing down this feature. It might be a result of Yahoo’s forecast downsizing.”
* New Yahoo! Messenger now available: “Even though Yahoo! Messneger might not be the most popular Instant Messenger out there, you might want to give it a try. The new version offers free text messaging to cellphones in the USA, Canada and Mexico.”
- Yahoo updates search index: “We’ve rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed very soon.”
- Telefonica and Yahoo! Partner to Bring Global Mobile Services to More Than 100 Million Consumers: “Under the terms of the agreement Telefonica’s local subsidiaries agree to offer Yahoo! oneSearch as the search engine partner on their mobile portals in Ireland, Latin America and the UK —Telefonica will also integrate Flickr and Yahoo! Mail into its portfolio of mobile Internet services.”
- Yahoo Buys Zimbra for $350 Million: “Yahoo is set to make yet another acquisition–this time of white-label open-source email provider Zimbra. Sources close to the deal said that the Internet portal will pay $350 million, considerably upward of its most recent valuation, for the email and calendar provider.”