'Net Features : yahoo search

Overall U.S. Search Growth Down Again

Linc Wonham — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 16:00:00 GMT

The latest numbers from comScore show that overall search volume growth in the U.S. fell to 7.6 percent in March, a 2.8-percent difference from the previous month and a considerably steeper drop from March, 2009:

•    March, 2009: 33.1%
•    June, 2009: 21.8%
•    September, 2009: 17.3%
•    December, 2009: 16.5%
•    January, 2010: 12.4%
•    February, 2010: 10.4%
•    March, 2010: 7.6%

In the U.S. share numbers, Google dropped four-tenths of a point to 65.1 percent. Yahoo had an equally uncharacteristic rise in share, and though it was only .01 percent (to 16.9%), it was the search engine’s first forward progress in 14 months.

Bing, meanwhile, continued to climb in the U.S. share results, gaining two-tenths of a percent to put it at 11.7.

So, what’s taking place in the search industry, at least in the U.S.? Barclays Capital Internet analyst Douglas Anmuth at least partly attributes the overall decline in growth to challenging comps that he says will last for another couple of months.

Yahoo! Index Update

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:45:00 GMT

Yahoo! rolled out some changes to its search index with "fresh web data" and updates to their crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the last three to five days.

Yahoo has had just two updates since last November: one in December, 2008, and another in late January this year. Yahoo! expects the update will be completed very soon.

As with any index update, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.

Are you seeing some improvements on the SERPs for your website?

Tiered Pricing for Yahoo Boss Search

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 08:29:00 GMT

You might have noticed that Yahoo Boss made its way into the feature article for February in a sidebar on site search options. If you're unfamiliar with Boss, it enables developers to use Web results from Yahoo's main search index within their own apps.

But as you've probably come to understand, technology moves fast. Yahoo this week announced several changes to its Boss and Search Monkey services. The search service was previously free and will remain so for those generating fewer than 10,000 queries per day, but after that, Yahoo will use a pricing model known as tiered pricing or "buckets" using much the same model as phone and energy companies of old.

Yahoo will begin charging for the service in the second quarter of 2009. Learn about the new open monetization, pricing, structured data and more at the Yahoo! Search Blog or review the Website Magazine article on the many flavors of site search.