Tag Archives | Yahoo

Yahoo Aims to Make Research Easier

Posted by Ed Oswald on July 7, 2009 at 10:38 am

YahooYahoo is adding a new feature to its search engine that it hopes will attract researchers to its product. Called Search Pad, the offering aims it make it easier to capture and organize information culled from search results. The feature could be useful if you spend a lot of time on search engines for research purposes.

The company plans to launch the feature at midnight, so if you want to check it out you’ll have to wait until then.

Essentially Search Pad would detect when a users is performing research, and offer options to save information in a central place. For example when research begins, links and thumbnails to websites are automatically saved. From there, the user can organize the information as they desire. Free-form note taking is also available.

If you see something that you’d like to include on the Search Pad that is not automatically added, drag and drop functionality will allow that, Yahoo says.

From there, if the user wishes to share their notes, printing and e-mail options are offered. Yahoo has also added social networking features, allowing Search Pad information to be shared over social networks such as Delicious, Facebook, and Twitter.

I’m not exactly sure whether Search Pad is a big enough feature to cause any great shift in market share to the #2 search engine, however it is something different. Differentiating yourself is a good thing these days.

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Michael Jackson’s Death Seen as Attack

Posted by David Worthington on June 26, 2009 at 7:02 pm

Google interpreted the swell of searches inspired by the passing of entertainer Michael Jackson as a malicious attack on its Google News service, according to reports.

People searching for news about the music icon after word spread about his condition were met by a cryptic message: “We’re sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”

It may sound as if Google goofed, but on the contrary, its system worked almost flawlessly. The alert was probably automatic, because traffic was at a significantly higher volume than under normal conditions, and many searches were mobile searches. The company caught onto what was really happening approximately 25 minutes later, CNET reported.

Google did not release specific traffic data, but Yahoo received 16.4 million visitors within 24 hours. The fact that both sites remained accessible is laudable; there was no change in performance from my end.

Had there been a major emergency somewhere in the world, the search giants would have remained a useful conduit for people seeking credible information about what was going on. The companies also showed that they could effectively protect their services from an actual attack.

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Feds Probing Tech Hiring Practices

Posted by Ed Oswald on June 3, 2009 at 9:49 am

The Justice Department has launched an antitrust probe to take a look at the methods used by some tech companies to hire employees. The Feds believe that methods used when negotiating the hiring of each others employees may be anti-competitive. According to the Washington Post, the investigation is industry-wide, however the DOJ is focusing primarily on the actions of several big-name tech companies.

Google, Yahoo, Apple, and Genetech are receiving the most attention in the early stages of the investigation. Investigators believe the deals to not hire away star talent may be anti-competitive and allows the companies maintain market dominance illegally.

This case is not the first time that the DOJ has taken on tech. In May, it said it would look into Google and Apple, who have strong ties in the leadership of each company. Specifically, the boards of either have strong representation of executives of the other, which could potentially be a conflict of interest.

Back on the subject of hiring, it will be interesting to see what the DOJ concludes. I never really noticed any issue until this story. Come to think of it, there is very low turnover between companies, especially in the upper echelons of managemen

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Is Microsoft Preparing to Announce a Yahoo Search Deal?

Posted by David Worthington on May 26, 2009 at 7:33 pm

Microsoft may be ready to inject some sizzle into its jaded romance with Yahoo. Jeffries investment bank analyst Katherine Egbert is reporting that Microsoft registered a limited liability company (LLC) in Delaware last week–a move that she believes could precipitate an acquisition or joint venture.

Microsoft also recently disclosed that it is issuing bonds, making an acquisition more of a likelihood.

Egbert suggested that Microsoft’s target may be desktop and virtualization management software maker Citrix, but Yahoo is also a highly candidate. The timing for Yahoo would fits in light of news that Microsoft intends to invest up to $100 million to advertise its “Bing” (or something) search engine.

That investment makes little sense unless Microsoft has a more compelling service and a greater flow of traffic to Bing. A deal with Yahoo would be a means to those ends, and it has repeatedly been on the table for months.

I’m happy using Google for search, so I would need to see some stunning search results before I make the switch. To put it bluntly, Microsoft might be blowing its $100 million on another failed consumer venture, and I believe that a Citrix deal would make more sense in the long term.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think about what’s in it for Microsoft is deploying virtual desktop environments within enterprises. Cloud computing and server-based virtualization are other areas where Microsoft would benefit. Strategically, acquiring Citrix would help Microsoft compete with VMware–one of the software giant’s greatest bete noires at the moment.

Whether Microsoft’s machinations involve Yahoo, Citrix, or something else, keep an ear out for news out of Redmond within the coming days or weeks.

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Yahoo Winds Down GeoCities. (Waitaminnit, GeoCities Still Exists?)

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 23, 2009 at 1:48 pm

GeoCities LogoBack in the mid-to-late 1990s, build-your-own-Website services like GeoCities were the easiest way for folks without much technical expertise to get content onto the Web. So it wasn’t an utter act of insanity when Yahoo spent $3.57 billion to acquire GeoCities in 1999. Well, okay, the $3.57 billion part was irrational, but the world needed GeoCities.

By the turn of the millennium, though, GeoCities and its rivals started to be overshadowed by blogging–and today, it’s blogging services such as WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and others that serve the purpose that GeoCities once did. I hadn’t given GeoCities much thought in years–until today, when I read on TechCrunch that Yahoo has stopped signing up new GeoCities members and will close the service altogether at some unspecified date later this year. Let’s hope that Yahoo does a better job of helping GeoCities users migrate to other options than AOL did when it shuttered its similar, similarly venerable AOL Hometown service last year–it gave users only a month’s warning, then purged their data and redirected their URLs to a terse blog post saying that Hometown was no more.

Yahoo’s GeoCities FAQ on the closure says that the service is going away “as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways.” Which is a vague way of saying “GeoCities is no longer a priority for us.” Presumably it’s part of Yahoo’s ongoing housecleaning, elimination of redundant services (it also offers Yahoo Web Hosting), and focus on core offerings with a high potential for profit.

There’s probably some alternate universe where GeoCities changed with the times and stayed popular, but it felt a tad dinosaurish even back when Yahoo bought it, thanks to a weird “homesteading” system that forced users to choose a neighborhood and street for their site, and annoyances such as a GeoCities logo that stayed on the screen even when you scrolled down on the page. On the other hand, a bunch of its 1990s competitors have managed to stick around–Homestead (now owned by Intuit and focused on small businesses), Tripod, and FortuneCity. Wonder if any of them will make a concerted effort to welcome the GeoCities residents who Yahoo is evicting?

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Yahoo Share to Likely Shrink in 2009

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 9, 2009 at 9:18 am

YahooDefinitely not good news for the world’s second biggest search provider. Yahoo is set to lose a chunk of market share over the next year or so, experts say.

This is due to the loss of two toolbar partners: HP, who signed up with Microsoft’s Live Search toolbar early last year; and Acer who silently switched its search provider to Google in October.

That failure could cost the search company about 15 percent of its market share, or about 3 percent in the overall rankings. While the company does admit that the termination of the deals will cause its share to shrink, it told the Wall Street Journal its own internal study showed less of a negative effect.

Losses wouldn’t be realized right away: instead, Yahoo’s share would likely shrink slowly as consumers replace their aging machines. The search provider could even be helped out by the deep recession in the meantime, which has slowed the replacement cycle even more.

Shrinking share could also have another effect: driving Yahoo’s search business into Microsoft’s open arms.  It’s becoming ever more clear that if Yahoo and Microsoft really want to compete with Google, they are going to have to join forces.

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Yahoo Music Gets Friendly With YouTube, iTunes, Others

Posted by Jared Newman on April 6, 2009 at 4:46 pm

YahooTomorrow, Yahoo will embrace all sorts of third-party widgets at its Yahoo Music pages, allowing visitors to create their own layouts of videos, listening stations and online stores.

The relaunched Yahoo Music intends to become a “starting point for music fans,” according to the press release. The logic goes that curiosity or love for a recording artist will compel you to visit the artist’s page on Yahoo Music, which acts as a content hub. Widgets, or “modules,” can be added, removed or moved around the page for each individual viewer, allowing you to nix iTunes if Amazon is your preference and dump Pandora if you prefer Last.fm. There are modules for YouTube and Rhapsody as well.

Yahoo Music currently hosts 500,000 artist pages, but down the line, the company wants to open artist page creation for any musician or record label. That sounds like an ambitious undertaking, but it could work well for indie bands with enough devotees.  A spokeswoman tells me that other modules will follow, such as online merch shops. CNet says this is all part of the company’s “Open” strategy of adding third-party features to its existing Web services.

I poked around the old Yahoo Music site today, and actually enjoyed its current form. The listening limit on the embedded Rhapsody links are a downer, but otherwise the site was clean and easy to navigate. Hopefully, the addition of extra modules won’t clutter the screen or grind down on my poor little netbook.

My other concern is remembering to visit when my first instinct for any curiosity is to plug a search into Firefox’s Google toolbar. Yahoo searchers will find the stuff easily, but it’d be really great if Yahoo Music could get enough Google juice to land on the front page of those Web searches, above or near Wikipedia. That would probably be too friendly.

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Samsung Releases the First Yahoo Widget-Enabled TV

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 25, 2009 at 12:25 am

[UPDATE: I credited Walt Mossberg with the column I mention below–wrong! The column’s called The Mossberg Solution, but it’s by Katherine Boehret. Corrected, and sorry about that.]

Walt Mossberg Katherine Boehret of the Wall Street Journal has reviewed Samsung’s LED TV 7000, the first set that supports the Yahoo Widget Engine platform for Internet-enabled applications that run right on the TV. Walt Katherine is impressed with Yahoo’s system, which is based on the cool Konfabulator, the application that started the whole widget craze a few years ago. I was impressed, too, when I visited Yahoo and got to try out the Widget Engine on a Samsung TV a few weeks ago. (Unfortunately, the Samsung set wasn’t ready for review in time for an article I recently wrote for PC World on ways to bring Internet TV into the living room, although I did squeeze in a mention.)

The Widget Engine is slick–the applets I tried reminded me of iPhone apps that happened to live on a TV rather than a phone. And the best thing about it is that it’s open: Anyone who wants to can build applications for it, and any application that anyone builds is available on any TV that supports the platform. That’s a far cry from most previous approaches to putting the Web and Web services such as Internet video onto TVs, most of which have been highly proprietary. (Panasonic’s Viera Cast is conceptually similar to what Yahoo is doing, but it’ll only deliver the services that Panasonic signs up–which means, so far, YouTube and a couple of others, with Amazon Video on Demand on the way.)

I’m not going to have a Widget-enabled TV in my living room any time soon, unfortunately–I don’t need a new TV, and Samsung’s set, at $3,000, isn’t an impulse item. But Yahoo has signed up not only Samsung but also Sony, LG, and Vizio to make Widget-ready sets. Those four companies are responsible for a sizable percentage of the TVs sold in this country, so chances are good that Yahoo’s software will be showing up on plenty of sets. If developers are as enthusiastic about the platform as electronics manufacturers are, the Widget Engine could end up being reason in itself to be tempted by a new TV.

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