This is an box for a short bio to be edited in the header.php file. Of course you can try to persuade people to Yahoo Updates Search Algorithms »
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Yesterday, Yahoo announced that they are in process of rolling out some algorithm changes. This means, don’t freak out if your Yahoo! rankings are fluctuating.
Even though Yahoo and the other search engines lag way behind Google in market share, they still have approximately 20% of the market. So, you can’t completely ignore them when they make changes.
Yahoo Responds to Microsoft – Again »
Since Microsoft’s attempt earlier this month to bully Yahoo into submission, Yahoo decided to publicly respond.
In a letter sent over the weekend, Roy Bostock and Jerry Yang had a few barbs sent Microsoft’s way:
As a follow up to a recent meeting among our respective legal advisors we had on this topic, and at your request, we provided to you on March 28 a list of additional information we would need to further our understanding of the regulatory issues associated with any transaction. To date, you have still not provided any of the requested information…
We consider your threat to commence an unsolicited offer and proxy contest to displace our independent Board members to be counterproductive and inconsistent with your stated objective of a friendly transaction. We are confident that our stockholders understand that our independent Board is best positioned to objectively and knowledgeably evaluate our Company’s alternatives and to maximize value.
In conclusion, please allow us to restate our position, so there can be no confusion. We are open to all alternatives that maximize stockholder value. To be clear, this includes a transaction with Microsoft if it represents a price that fully recognizes the value of Yahoo! on a standalone basis and to Microsoft, is superior to our other alternatives, and provides certainty of value and certainty of closing.
Seems pretty clear to me. Yahoo is not opposing ANYTHING that brings value to its stockholders, including a purchase by Microsoft. Although, if Microsoft buys Yahoo, it will probably be a big blow for Open-Source software since much of Yahoo’s platform is open source and Microsoft wants the whole world to only use it’s clunky software.
Yahoo Improves Search Market Share in December »
With all that shopping going on in December, it should come as no surprise that Search Engine traffic was down slightly (-3.9%) across the board during the month. After all, who can find time to goof around on the Internet when they are too busy doing last minute shopping?
Despite that drop, Yahoo! search traffic was actually up. In fact, according to a comScore report, they were the big winner for the month with a 0.5% increase in use and, since they dipped 0.4% in November, that basically put them back where they were in October with a 22.9% overall market share. However, Google is still the big dog with 58.4% share of the Search market. That translates to more than 5.5 billion (yes, billion) searches per month using Google. That number does not include searches performed on YouTube and other Google owned properties, which tracked an additional 1.5 billion results in December alone.
As you can imagine, search traffic on shopping sites climbed quite a bit in December. For example, Amazon sites logged 215 million searches, which was a better than 20% increase over their numbers in November. eBay was up 3.9% and Craigslist was up 6.3%.
Social networking sites saw a decline in use in December. My guess would be the fact that people were actually networking the old fashioned way – fact-to-face at parties. That means they were not spending as much time searching on Facebook (-14.3%) and MySpace (-19.9%). Plus, in many cases, people are accessing those sites while they are at work and, since most workers are using up their vacation time before the end of the year, they were not logging in each day.
At any rate, the numbers should be back to normal starting this month, but Google is still going to be on top.
Check out our Flash graphic in the far right column for a visual 
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November Search Engine Market Share »
There were no significant changes in Search Engine market share from October to November ‘07, according to Virginia based Internet information provider comScore. Google is still way out in front compared to the others and, although Yahoo! dropped and AOL/Time Warner grabbed a little more share, everyone basically kept their same positions in November.
Of the 10 billion searches tracked, here is how they broke down during the month:
- Google captured 5.9 billion
- Yahoo! accounted for 2.2 billion searches
- Microsoft dropped just below the 1 billion mark at 984 million
- Ask was used 463 million times
- and AOL/Time Warner sites were used for 453 million searches.
AOL/Time Warner had the largest jump during the month (0.3 points) and Yahoo! had the biggest drop of -0.4 points.
For all you visual people out there, we have a pretty, little Flash graphic in the right column, so check it out
Faststone Screen Capture is an absolute "can't do without" piece of software. Capture screenshots in a fixed window or with the scrolling window feature. It even has a screen color-picker that will tell you the code for any color that is displayed on your screen. Love it. Oh, its free too! 
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