Yahoo! New left Menu

The other innovation from the Yahoo! search team is the search history.  When you‘re looking for different keywords relevant to one topic Yahoo! can differentiate between two meanings for the same word.  For example, Yahoo! will understand that Jaguar is a car company and not an animal.

All these improvement are very good and quite user friendly, but I am not sure why they are doing all this work when we know that Bing is going to take over. Also, I cannot find any of these new options on Yahoo!. Maybe it is not online yet or I am not smart enough to find it.

Bing Yahoo! - Deal

What does this deal means for SEO?

Firstly, the Yahoo search engine will disappear pretty soon. So you will not have to worry anymore about the Yahoo ranking report. You should start checking where your ranking on Bing is and take it more seriously because with this deal we can expect a bigger market share for Bing search engine (probably 15 to 20% in Europe, 30% for the US). Good news for reports

If Bing is bigger that also means that our company or your SEO agency should update and create new Bing recommendations and not only focus on Google. Now you should understand Bing and how it is working.

After more than five years of SEO recommendations focused only on Google, the rules will be a little bit different now. SEO recommendations should now include Google and Bing best practices and try to see what Google and Bing have in common as well as their differences.

The good thing about it is that Bing and Google are probably very similar and your SEO strategy should not really change.

Bing has some new challenges, for example the pop-up that opens when you have your mouse on the result. This will need to be covered to make sure it is attractive to the user.

In a way, by having one less search engine more SEO work should be created, because we will no longer focusing on one search engine.

Google new presentation

This new presentation looks a little bit better but it is not a major change. When you click on the picture on the left of the map you are automatically redirected to Google Maps with the location where the picture was taken.
Compared to Yahoo!, Google is (once again), a little bit late with this update. The Yahoo! results page has a different view and offers its own content relevant to the city and not a direct link to the map. You can, for example, find information about hotel, restaurant, flights and maps. Yahoo! also proposes some pictures of the city and the top rated things to do.

Yahoo! London Search Result Page

For this kind of search the Yahoo! result page is definitely the best functional solution and they also eliminate the competition (because all the content proposed is from Yahoo! or partners). This is probably why Google did not propose any hotel, restaurant on its own result page.
Once again they Google seem to have attempted to copy Yahoo!

The only way to have access to this option is via the advanced image search, which is not very user friendly.

Google Image Search

This function is obviously good and simple but this is clearly not an original idea, they seem to have copied the idea from Yahoo! They don’t even add anything to it.

 
Google has infuriated Microsoft this week with the Google O.S. and today, they have probably irritated Yahoo! by replicating their function.

 
Google are definitely trying to kill off the competition… and I am not sure that Yahoo! can take it. Between Bing and Google the chances of Yahoo’s continuing success are minimal.

The Yahoo pad is organised by websites visited and you can add comments about each of these websites, you can also make general comments not relevant to any of the websites.

It is a nice idea to take notes when you research online, but to be honest it is pretty useless. Primarily, to use it you need to have a Yahoo account and activate it. After few searches on Yahoo about mobile phones and Rio de Janeiro, Yahoo didn’t give me the option of opening the pad! .. Really annoying, you cannot open this pad whenever you want or need to…

Also this pad doesn’t offer a lot more than a simple Notepad (from Windows) just a better presentation. I do not see the big advantage or value of this tool.

Yahoo should focus more time on its search engine algorithm or useful functions than little gadgets that nobody is going to use.

It is not the first time that Google and Yahoo have had their own shortcut on the results page; you can look, for example, at any conversion rate (money, distance…).

For the French Open, Google set up an RSS feed from the official website to its result page (for the keywords relevant to Roland Garros). This graphic version is pretty simple and the result links to the official website.

Google - Roland Garros

Yahoo! once again has worked a little bit harder with its own RSS feed. The result links to the Yahoo sport section. There are also some other links to some other pages of Yahoo! Sport (Scores, schedule, photos and video). The graphic view of the score is also a little clearer.

Yahoo - Roland Garros

It is a very good way for Yahoo! to promote is own content. Yahoo! also did a lot better job by proposing some other links relevant to Roland Garros. Google’s provides minimum services, but did it…

The principal is simple, when you are looking for a picture on Yahoo a filter bar shows up with different options. You can select a picture by size, colour, from Flickr or not, all of these option are very classic, however Yahoo! includes a re-use option. When you select this new option you have two more different choices; either select image free to reuse for commercial reasons or the one that can be modified.

Yahoo! Image Search - Reuse

The Yahoo! filter uses a Creative Commons license in order to select the copyright free images.

My question is what stops a user using a not copyright free image from a third party element and post the picture under a Creative Commons license…

Anyway, this new function of Yahoo! Search Image is pretty interesting and for once different from Google!

BrandZ -Top 100 Brands

The top 5 brands are:

Google
Microsoft
Coca-cola
IBM
McDonald’s

This is the third time that Google has held the top position, and I am pretty sure that Google will retain this position in 2010.

Over the past few years Google has reached pretty much every area of the internet (Search engine, Map, News, Internet explorer, phone, social media, video…). Although Microsoft is planning many future online projects, it seems unlikely that they can become as popular as Google in a year. The fact that Microsoft is desperately trying for partnership with Yahoo shows that future prospects of Microsoft may not be too good…

Anyway, we are now living in a Google world after a few years of Microsoft world.

Welcome to the Googlelisation of the world.

The aim of Earth day is to promote awareness for the Earth’s environment. It was created by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970.

Google and Yahoo have both decided to promote this event, but not at the same cost once again.

Both Yahoo and Google promote Earth Day on their home page.

Earth Day - Google

Google includes a new ‘Google’ logo and a links to a Google result page for the keyword ‘Earth Day’. Not too much work for Google !

Yahoo on the other hand has created a little flash animation on its logo and links to its own website Yahoo! Green where they have created new pages about this event. This site has some nice flash animations and information. Yahoo wants to finance this website by advertising on it.

Yahoo Earth Day Logo

Yahoo Green - Earth Day

Once again, Yahoo have made a lot more effort than Google, but the weird thing is people are talking a lot more about the Earth Day Google logo initiative than the micro site of Yahoo… …..must be difficult to be Yahoo!

Everything is ready to attract new users. And we can see that Google and Yahoo have definitely chosen the right country to fight over, with over 45 million  internet users in India. And the Indian internet market is growing pretty quickly. So what have the done for the Indian election 2009? Both of them have now made a micro site about this election:

Yahoo Site - Indian Election

http://in.elections.yahoo.com/ from Yahoo! and

Google Site - Indian Election

http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/loksabha2009/ from Google.

My first impression is that Yahoo! has made a far better job of it than Google on this one. The design and structure of the information is very well done particularly in comparison with  Google’s attempt. Google has just created an iGoogle page for this election; not that user friendly!

We can also see that Yahoo!, unlike Google, is trying to make some money via advertising to finance this initiative. I imagine that this is because Yahoo has spent a lot more money on this project than Google and need to recoup their financial investment.

But the investment (time and money) is very little compared to the amount put in to the American election few months ago (obviously from an American company this is no big surprise).

It is hard to know who will be the big winner of this battle but one thing is sure Yahoo has come up with the best website, but the funny thing is on the first page of Yahoo result page,  for the keyword ‘Lok Sabha Elections 2009’ we cannot find the Yahoo site – a mistake not made by Google.com