'Net Features : site explorer

So Long Site Explorer

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:01:00 GMT

Now that the Bing/Yahoo Search Alliance is in full effect there seems to no longer be a need for Yahoo! Site Explorer – one of the most used search engine optimization tools on the market – so Yahoo! is shutting the service down.

Yahoo transitioned the backend of its organic search to the Microsoft search platform last year to great fanfare. As Bing Webmaster Center began gaining several new functionality and features, maintaining two services apparently did not make sense so the final days for Site Explorer have finally arrived. Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools will now be the only source for Bing and Yahoo! webmaster site and analytics data.

Yahoo! indicated that it will continue to “innovate on the search experience beyond the services delivered by Microsoft” meaning their slurp crawlers will continue to selectively crawl websites.

Yahoo! Search is Dead... Amen.

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Last week Yahoo! began transitioning certain back-end functions for its Search product over to Microsoft's search platform. The transition is now complete. If you follow the world of SEO closely, welcome to a two-horse race.

Yahoo! Web, Image, and Video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now being powered by the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada (English) and more markets will follow shortly. Yahoo! is advising that webmasters continue to provide site information to Yahoo! using Site Explorer until the full global transition is complete (not expected until 2012).

All actions performed on Site Explorer that webmasters perform including site and Web page submissions, feed submission deleting and un-deleting URL, adding dynamic URLs and undoing dynamic URLs will be shared with Bing. Site Explorer will still exist after the transition and will ultimately provide analysis of the traffic that sites receive from search originating on Yahoo! and its partner sites. Yahoo! is working to finalize a revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come.

Yahoo! stood firm with its promise to "continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike."

And now for an important counter quote from Lawrence Garfield (Danny Devito) in the 1991 film Other People's Money:

"Amen. And amen. And amen. You have to forgive me. I'm not familiar with the local custom. Where I come from, you always say 'Amen' after you hear a prayer. Because that's what you just heard - a prayer. Where I come from, that particular prayer is called 'The Prayer for the Dead.'"

Yahoo! Site Explorer Updates

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:16:00 GMT

Finally, some signs of life from Yahoo Search!

Yahoo announced it has updated its Site Explorer to include new data (for page-level and site-level) including key terms, delicious.com activities, top delicious tags and Search Monkey Objects. These additions come about one month after Yahoo added top queries and URLs to the tool.

At the page level, Site Explorer users will be able to see SearchMonkey object statistics. You will need to have marked up pages (or provided Yahoo with a feed that matches one of their existing SearchMonkey templates) but if you have your page will show all SearchMonkey objected that were indexed for that page.

Yahoo has also included Yahoo Search key terms and delicious bookmark information for pages, giving you a good way to explore all sort of metadata about your pages. Site Explorer now also provides a site-level dashboard that displays additional information, including the number of SearchMonkey feeds you submitted and a history of any custom actions you have requested for your site (such as defining URL query parameters that you want Yahoo to ignore).

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