Fool on the Street: Yahoo! on Madison Avenue
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The search giant seeks success with the biggest and the best.
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Some new features may give Yahoo! shareholders reason to shout.
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It knows what you want Score one for Yahoo! in the ongoing battle for online ad dollars. Yesterday, the beleaguered company unveiled a new banner ad platform that allows marketers to target web users according to their online behavior, a talent typically reserved for text-based ad engines. The new platform, known as SmartAds, could give Yahoo! at least a temporary leg-up on DoubleClick, the ad serving company that Google recently agreed to purchase in a deal worth $3.1bn.â¦
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This morning Yahoo! announced that its new search marketing platform, Yahoo Search Marketing &#8216;Panama&#8217;, is now available to advertisers that wish to open a new Yahoo! sponsored search account.   U.S. based accounts can now sign up online to begin marketing products through Yahoo!&#8217;s completely redesigned system. Previously, the system was only open to Yahoo!&#8217;s [...]
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They&#8217;re an opinion piece from the Marc and Angel Blog which compares Yahoo &#038; Google and appears to be making it to the Digg homepage quite shortly. Google handles all of my daily web searching, email, chat, RSS feeds, blog monetization, etc. In my opinion, it blows Yahoo (and most other Internet companies) clear out of [...]
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They pooh-poohed Yahoo! -- just before it surged some 50%.
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Leading search companies Google and Yahoo didn&#39;t appear to have a presence at the CTIA Wireless I.T. &amp; Entertainment conference in San Francisco this week, but their startup competitors and smaller rival AOL were all angling for influence over mobile search.While&#160;Google&#160;and&#160;Yahoo&#160;have been pursuing what is perceived to be a large opportunity in mobile search and advertising, they&#39;ve met resistance from mobile operators in the U.S.&quot;Some are concerned about Google and Yahoo being stronger competitors, that [the operators] will become in effect the dumb pipe that the ISPs became,&quot; said Greg Sterling, an analyst following mobile search as part of a joint venture between Sterling Market Research and Opus Research. &quot;I think that&#39;s a valid fear.&quot;That creates an opportunity for companies such as JumpTap and Medio, which offer technologies to operators to present self-branded search tools for their mobile users.Operators tell JumpTap that they don&#39;t want Google and other online search brands to siphon away search traffic, and with it, the opportunity to earn revenue from advertising, said Adam Soroca, vice president and general manager of search services for JumpTap.But operators and startups face a steep challenge: Any mobile user can simply type the URL for their preferred search provider into a browser on a mobile phone. Users will do that if they think that the search from the online giants is better and if they want to access connected services such as mail and calendars, Sterling said.If the carriers manage to offer a better search experience, and one that may be easier to use because it is placed predominantly on the phone home screen, which the operator controls, then people may use it. &quot;But if their experience is lackluster or sub par or comparable, then they&#39;re at a disadvantage, because the brand strength and other tie-ins [from Google or Yahoo] are greater,&quot; he said.JumpTap said its technology is superior to other mobile search offerings because it uses proprietary algorithms that are mobile-specific. In addition, JumpTap knows the search history and location of users, so it can display more relevant results and advertising, Soroca said.In addition to the startups, competitors of Google and Yahoo in PC-based online search are working hard to prevent the search giants from dominating the mobile Internet. Microsoft is pursuing a foothold in mobile search and has an advantage through its Windows Mobile operating system. Phones running the OS feature a link to Microsoft&#39;s Live Search on the start page.Also, AOL made a handful of announcements at the CTIA conference about new mobile services. It even had a booth, which included a small poster for JumpTap in the area of the stand promoting a new AOL mobile search offering. JumpTap said it could not discuss any relationship with AOL. AOL could not be reached for comment.It&#39;s ironic that JumpTap may be fueling AOL, which ranks low among PC-based search offerings but has a strong brand. &quot;The scenario that operators are concerned about, [JumpTap is] enabling&quot; with AOL, Sterling noted. But from JumpTap&#39;s perspective, AOL looks like one more customer, he said.
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Ads chemical romance Search engine behemoth Yahoo! has ramped up its service for advertisers by acquiring privately held global ad network BlueLithium for $300m.â¦
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Have they no shame? The team at Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) is the latest to cast a wary eye on Google&#39;s (Nasdaq: GOOG) popular new desktop search tool and yell, &quot;me too
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RealNetworks finds a partner in Yahoo! Music.
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The Hive Mind Sees All Camping World Congress If you thought Facebook's Beacon ad program had FAIL written all over it, wait until you see what Yahoo! has in store for you.â¦
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Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion -- but how did a company that started so small come to be worth so much? That's a story that began in the early days of the World Wide Web, when people were struggling to keep track of the new world of multimedia it offered them.In those days people viewed the Web through NCSA Mosaic, a browser that helped popularize the Web; they could check the level of coffee in the Trojan Room coffee machine at Cambridge University using the first Web cam on the Internet, and they could read the headlines on the NandO Times, one of the first "new media" operations.Yahoo first appeared on the Internet in 1994 when Jerry Yang and David Filo were still at Stanford University -- something that was immediately obvious from the site's first address: http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/. It wasn't until later in 1994 that the easier-to-type http://www.yahoo.com came along, but even then it redirected to the Stanford server.But back in 1994 people weren't that concerned about clunky addresses. They'd been living with the text-based Internet for years and the Web with all of its richness had people hooked. Yahoo stepped in to solve an early problem: how could users keep track of the fast expanding World Wide Web.What Yang and Filo built was revolutionary for the time: a hierarchical index of the Web divided into subjects like "computers," "government" and "society and culture." (The service lives on today as the Yahoo Directory)Love at first sightFrom the early days it was clear that users loved Yahoo."David Filo and Jerry Yang should be given a Medal of Honor, then locked in a room and never allowed to get lives: they are already doing an excellent job of categorizing the Web with Yahoo's Hostlist," wrote one user in response to a Sept. 1994 Usenet posting asking for a directory of Web sites.Word of the service spread through the Internet, often from enthusiastic users passing on details of the resource, but sometimes with a little promotion by Yang and Filo themselves."We have a pretty comprehensive listing at the Yahoo Database," wrote Yang on Usenet in Sept. 1994. "It's an attempt to be organized by subject (although not very well) -- but we are working on it. Searchable too," he wrote.All the time Yang and Filo continued to live everyday lives, unaware they would become billionaires in less than a decade. A look at old Usenet postings reveals Yang campaigning for fair funding for college students while Filo was trying to trade World Cup tickets online.As 1995 began, Yahoo was serving up 200,000 pages per day from its index of about 25,000 Web sites, and was about to hit the big time. During that year Yang published a book about Yahoo and earned an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air. Both cofounders appeared on a PBS Frontline TV documentary about the Internet called "High Stakes in Cyberspace.""What Yahoo does is make your wasting your time easier. It wants you to get where you want to go to waste time faster so you don't have to waste time wasting time," is how Yang explained Yahoo in the documentary, according to a transcript of the show.The publicity came just as thousands of people started piling onto the Web and new sites were popping up faster and faster. As a result by the middle of June 1996 Yahoo had jumped to 9 million pages per day and in the third quarter of that year traffic for the three-month period hit 1 billion page views.Investment in the popular and fast growing site wasn't far behind its rising popularity. In April 1995 Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo with two rounds of venture funding just as Yang and Filo decided to put their studies on hold and start running Yahoo full time."We [hadn't] done anything on our research in the last few months," Filo told CIO magazine in a June 1995 interview. "We had to decide which thing to pursue, and we're not really interested in what our PhDs were in."An initial public offering and international expansion was next on the cards, and by the end of 1996 Yahoo had sites in the U.K., Germany, France, and Japan, and had launched the Yahooligans service for kids.Early competitionYahoo wasn't without competition back in those days. WebCrawler was getting popular and Lycos was also making a name for itself, but none of the search engines at the time fully satisfied people. So it was common to switch allegiances whenever a better service came along. In 1996 many Internet users did just that when sites like Inktomi and Digital Equipment's Altavista launched.But Yahoo managed to endure the competition, possibly because its directory often was a better place to find links that the early search engines.Microsoft was making a late start on the Internet, launching MSN as a dial-up Internet access service in the U.S. in 1995. It wasn't until a few years later that MSN was relaunched as a portal and still more years until Microsoft put its full weight behind developing Internet-based products and services.Like Yahoo, Google also grew out of Stanford University but didn't start to achieve recognition until the end of the decade. Within a few years, however, it had grown to become the leader in online search.Today Yahoo is one of the most powerful online media brands in the world. It has more than 500 million users in numerous countries and its name is recognizable to billions of people.
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Anyone for strip poker? Yahoo! folk have thrown a large web 2.0 ball at their search engine by giving it a makeover in an effort to grab market share from rival internet firm Google.â¦
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Would Yahoo! give Microsoft an unfair advantage over Google?
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I've not made much of a secret of the fact that I've been working on a new product, and am getting close to offering it as a public pre-alpha thing for Mac users only.  It's fairly Flickr-centric, sucking photos down from Flickr in a variety of ways and pushing up photos in others. Like Radio 8 and Google Reader, it has the ability to maintain an output feed of stuff you want to pass on to friends and associates. As I was developing this I wished that Flickr had the ability to store simple text files, because I needed a place to put an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures on behalf of each user. Of course I used Amazon S3, but I had to implement my own lightweight identity system so that Juan couldn't accidentally or intentionally replace Alice's feed. If only every user had a place where they could store stuff that's net accessible so that once and for all we could stop inventing new places. I was inspired to write about this when I read an Uncov review of Pownce where they reminded me that they were reselling S3 storage at a big markup. What if the users had their own S3 storage that they paid for themselves?  Then it occurred to me to ask if people thought S3 could be an end-user thing. I'd like to find out, so if some non-technical users who have Amazon accounts would like to try setting up an S3 account, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes. Here's an idea of how you get started. 1. You must already have an Amazon account. Nothing special about it, if you buy shirts or books or stereo equipment from Amazon, you use the same account for S3 storage. Already that's pretty easy, millions of people have Amazon accounts, right? 2. Visit this page on Amazon, ignore all the stuff about objects and buckets. In the right margin is a big button that says "Sign up for this web service." Click the button. A very familiar page appears, asking you to sign into your Amazon account as if you were going to buy something (you are!). 3. From there, I'm not sure what you see, because I have already enabled my account. But the end result of signing up is that you get two strings with weird names: Your Access Key ID and Your Secret Access Key. Any software that would save a document in S3-space on your behalf would need these two strange strings. In return each document would have a URL just like any other document on the web. Nothing strange about that.  4. You could also use the space to store stuff using an FTP-like app that runs in Firefox called S3 Organizer. It's about as hard to use as the Mac Finder or the Windows Explorer, i.e. it's no challenge for a moderately geeky user. The cool thing about it is that you're able to share anything you upload into S3 space with anyone else. You can even use BitTorrent to access any file to save you bandwidth bills and distribute the load round the net. It's all very easy to do, imho. As a developer who has to pay for his users' storage needs I would very much like to see users learn how to use S3 to store their stuff, so I can focus on writing software and fixing bugs instead of paying to store your stuff.
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Bill Wise of Media Post has put together a thoughtful review of Yahoo&#8217;s reorganization. I had heard a couple of people referring to the Yahoo Reorg as a negative for the Yahoo company and search industry.  I never really understood where they were coming from, nor could they back it up. Seems that there is [...]
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Oh! Noes! Yahoo! is using the departure of its US head of sales to reorganise its sales department.â¦