Yahoo UK & Others Switching To Bing Organic Results August 3rd. Yahoo has sent out an update stating they are migrating the organic results for Yahoo’s European properties to Bing’s search index this Wednesday, August 3, 2011. The organic search on Yahoo UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy will begin transitioning over to Bing powered results this Wednesday. Yahoo has not yet and will not yet transition over the paid search ads.
Those will remain as is on Yahoo UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. The organic results are the only things transitioning over on Yahoo UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. Yahoo completed their transition on the US property back in August 2010. To prepare, Yahoo says: Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! MapQuest Launches Local Business Listings Center. Local SEOs have another tool to add to the “citation belt,” as it were: MapQuest has announced its own Local Business Center, a place where local businesses can add and/or manage their listing(s) on MapQuest. As the video below shows, the MapQuest LBC functions very much like Google’s and Bing’s and offers many of the same basic features such as photo uploads, videos, categories and so forth.
MapQuest is also offering two premium listing levels at $99 and $399 per year — the latter of which includes distribution of business information to other sites like Yelp, Yahoo Local, SuperPages and others. The MapQuest Local Business Center is currently available to US businesses only. Here’s the MapQuest intro video that shows how it works: It’s been more than two years since Google Maps surpassed MapQuest as the number one mapping destination in the US, but MapQuest remains a healthy number two in the latest Hitwise travel category market share chart:
Yahoo Experiments With New UI, Content For Local. It has been quite some time since Yahoo updated its pioneering and once-dominant local destination, Yahoo Local. Now the company is testing a simplified UI that streamlines the user experience and offers new content (including deals) in a number of cities. Below are screens showing the current and new Local UIs.
First the existing site and then the new beta site for Local: Overall the new site is less cluttered and more attractive visually. However it is also “missing” some features that are present today. The first thing you notice about the new Local UI is that it’s essentially a list, likely inspired by Twitter and/or Facebook’s news feeds. The new Local beta is really about “discovery” rather than search. There’s no local-specific search box here either. Currently there’s a dedicated Yahoo Local search experience, as well as local results that appear within Yahoo Search. Despite the new emphasis on UGC, reviews appear to be gone from the new Local experience. The Yahoo Search Revenue Disaster. Yesterday, Yahoo reported a second quarter of massive declines in its search revenue. Yahoo blamed the “headwind” of paying its partner Microsoft 12% of Yahoo’s net search revenues.
Yahoo also said Microsoft’s ads are underperforming. But even without these factors, Yahoo has seen an almost unbroken quarterly decline in search revenues since 2008. Failure is not all down to Microsoft. POSTSCRIPT: Since I wrote this, I’ve talked with Yahoo. Be sure to read the postscripts that have been added to various sections. POSTSCRIPT 2 (July 19, 2012): See As The Yahoo-Microsoft Search Alliance Falls Short, Could A Yahoo-Google Deal Emerge? Revealed: Yahoo’s Search Revenues Since 2008 Until recently, Yahoo has only provided what I’ll call “Gross Search Revenues” figures, which are how much Yahoo has earned from search-related ads without deducting the cost of paying some partners to carry those ads. Partner costs are generally referred to as Traffic Acquisition Costs, or TAC.
Blame Your Partner. Yahoo Local Expands Its Beta To Mobile. Yahoo is making a big push today for its new local search (edit: see below) interface, which offers a somewhat dramatic change both in the content it includes and how it’s presented. Greg Sterling actually covered most of this a couple weeks ago here on SEL, but here’s a quick recap: The new desktop beta offers a stream-like display of local news, deals, events, and other content that comes from Yahoo editors, local websites and blogs, and community members contributing directly to Yahoo Local. A lot of that content is new to Yahoo Local; some of it expands on Yahoo’s recent focus on Deals-based content and some is made possible by the company’s push into hyperlocal content in recent months, as well as its purchase of Associated Content earlier this year.
(If adoption picks up, the new Yahoo Local could become a hyperlocal blog/content network to be reckoned with.) It’s an interesting mix of content. Where Is Search Going: Yahoo’s Sashi Seth. I’m continuing my look at what search might look like in the future with this first part of a fascinating interview with Shashi Seth, the Senior VP of Search Products at Yahoo.
With the recent Bing arrangement, Yahoo now finds themselves in an interesting position in the search game. Now that Yahoo search results are powered by Bing’s algorithm, the company can move its focus from maintaining a web index to how the information is presented to the user. It’s analogous to a car manufacturer farming out the drive train assembly to a partner so they can focus on body styles and interiors. So, my first question for Shashi is now, in the new search ecosystem, what does the Senior VP of Search do at Yahoo? Seth: Our goal with Yahoo Search was to rethink search, essentially. The reason I came to Yahoo was because I felt that search had been fairly stagnant in the past 5-6 years and hadn’t evolved a significant amount in that timeframe. Seth: That’s correct. But this brings up a thorny problem. Yahoo Reveals Secrets Of “Search Direct” Alogrithm. I had about 20 minutes with Yahoo’s Shashi Seth after the press conference to discuss a range of things related to the Search Direct announcement.
First, he confirmed that Search Direct entirely replaces Yahoo’s Search Assist. Indeed one way to look at it is as Search Assist Plus. The Answer Is Out There Seth said to me that for about 50 percent of the top queries on the web there is a “definite answer” and that Yahoo will strive to provide that within Search Direct. Seth predicted that “in a couple of years we may walk completely away from the SERP as we know it.”
It struck me, however, that Yahoo was not eliminating the SERP but shrinking and compressing it down to this miniaturized format. Search Direct Will Look Different on Tablets Seth clarified that when expressed on tablets or mobile devices it could take very different forms. I asked about the algorithm. Search and Display Hook Up We also spoke briefly about the advertising angle here. It’s both “push” and “pull.” Yahoo Local.