MSN Vs Yahoo search engine.

We always had the habit of debating Google and Yahoo for a change now let us debate between Yahoo and MSN or Yahoo vs. the new Microsoft Bing Search engine.



Primarily most of us will just conclude Yahoo is the much better compared to MSN. In most cases I agree with that when you see the below image from hit link it shows a clear trend where yahoo is well ahead than MSN.



Yahoo was once very dominant and was getting about 30% of search engine traffic. But as Google grew it made it very dominant and much stronger in some places in US market share of Google is well above 90%. 3 years back Yahoo results were powered by Google so virtually Yahoo's market share is Google's market share. Now they are an independent search engine and they power a lot of search engines. So I am sure Yahoo is a search engine here to stay.
As a SEO company we monitor a lot of logs of our clients. In most cases we see consistent performances from Yahoo when rankings are similar in all top 3 search engines. So I see no point in comparing who is better Yahoo or MSN. But wait it's not all over. After years of being an underdog Microsoft cant anymore to get back their search engine market share. They came down with a bang with the search engine called Bing. So did Bing work indeed yes? They excess advertising of Bing and the improved quality of results made Bing instant famous and already a hit. Bing as far as I tested has much better quality results than the MSN live search and MSN Global search. I am sure Bing is here to stay we need to see few more months whether they can steal any percentage of Market share from Google. It's just 15 days from launch and too early to say whether they will be dominant. But there are early signs it will be a success story.



Wall street Journal reports
"The number of times people clicked on ads listed next to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) search results jumped about 8% in the week since the software giant released its newly revamped search engine, dubbed Bing, the world's largest search engine marketing firm said Thursday."

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090611-716373.html

Bloomberg reports
"Microsoft's share rose to 11.1 percent in the June 2-6 period, Bing's first week in operation, from 9.1 percent a week prior, ComScore said on its Web site. Average daily penetration among searchers, a measure of how many people are being reached by the product, rose to 15.5 percent from 13.8 percent."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a0xxEn3GGCd0

We never know what the future holds for search engines. I am sure there will be some real tough competitors for Google.

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Yahoo June 2009 search engine ranking update:



Yahoo updated its search engine index on 2nd of June. I can see a lot of shuffling happening most of our rankings got boosted. This is the 1st update in June 2009 I am happy to see yahoo keeping upto expectations.

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Mini sitelinks a copycat idea from yahoo and MSN

Google has now introduced / testing mini site links. Sitelinks are links that are below a website which is felt authority for a particular keyword. If you search for your domain name you can see sitelinks in Google results. Now Google has copied the idea MSN and yahoo had been using for a long time. They are integrating site links inside the snippets displayed.

Check here:


Google has copied this idea from Yahoo and MSN. Internet is fully of copy cats and Google is no exception I feel.

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Yahoo Makes money now from Yahoo search BOSS developer network:

BOSS is currently offered to developers free of charge. In the near future (likely late Q2 2009), we plan to implement a fee structure for API use above a set threshold.

BOSS will continue to offer free use of the API below a set daily threshold - up to 10,000 search queries per day depending on the type of API call. In addition, we plan to implement a service level agreement (SLA) in parallel with fees. We will announce firm timing and further details when we get closer to launch.

When we implement fees, we also plan to offer developers the ability to make non-time sensitive API requests at a significantly reduced price. This "off-peak" option can be used for research and analysis efforts to support building search experiences and would allow developers to request queries to be fulfilled by BOSS when capacity permits.

How Will Fees Work?

We currently plan to implement a fee system with the following structure:

· Fees will be determined based on the number and type of API requests made per day

· We are no longer restricting developers from monetizing their products using third-party platforms

· Fees will be determined using a unit system

· Units for Web, News, and Image BOSS API calls will be incurred based on the last result requested. For example, an API call requesting results 91-100 is the same cost as one requesting results 1-100

· Developers may request up to 1000 results in a single API call

· Units will cost $.10

· Developers will receive 30 units per day for free of charge

https://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/fees.html

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Yahoo search update February 2009:

Yahoo has done a update to their index and I can see a lot of changes and shuffling of results for my client sites. Most of our client site rankings got boosted this time. Yahoo loves most of our client sites they sometimes act very weird when it come to ranking sites. Their ranking algorithm is the most difficult to rank as well as the most easy at times. There are sites we had been trying for months to rank in yahoo but none of the keywords are in first page but there are few sites which we just do work for a week and from 2nd week it tends to dominate for major keywords.

According to official Yahoo search blog, Sharad Sharma reports that they have done a yahoo search index update and this will affect ranking and indexing of websites. Sharad also mentions they have updated their algorithm this time I am sure it's a minor changes because way I am seeing across most of our sites and client sites is that there is little or no movement and the few movement we see are all positive and upwards.
http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/27/weather-report-yahoo-search-index-update-19/
According to Ysearchblog.com
"We've rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We have had two updates since last November: one in December, 2008, and another in late January this year. We expect the update will be completed very soon. Throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.

While we didn't do Weather Reports for the December and January updates, we heard loud and clear that the community still finds them helpful, so we'll continue to provide these reports."
I hope your sites are doing better.
Good luck with update.

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Yahoo launched a new video platform

If you are website publisher, just like videos on the flickr's new mobile site you will be able to use Yahoo's video platform to convert your user's uploaded clips into great looking, iPhone-ready video files.

On Thursday, Yahoo launched an updated version of mobile website for Flickr with the ability to playback Flickr's short, 90-second video on iPhone and iPod touch. Various other devices like mobiles will also be supported very soon. Videos on flickr's mobile site are processed using Yahoo's new video platform, which works on the backend to transcode uploaded videos into the high-quality H.264 format. There is also a web API for feeding Videos into transcoder and for collecting the results.

After the demo session was held, some questions pass to the development team responsible for new video platform by flickr's. Since the web API was being developed the various queries goes like this.

Will the transcoder API be made publicly available to webapp creators so they can include video in their creations?
What are the player software options developers have available to work with? Flickr in the browser is using flash now. The mobile site launches the quicktime player on iPhone. On the Nokia N-series it presumably launches the Nokia video player? Real players?
What other Yahoo properties will take advantages of this new video platform? News? Movie trailers? TV.Yahoo.Com?
Yahoo Developer Network Website will give details about the video platforms public availability.

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Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update

Yahoo update coming, yahoo will soon update their search index and there will be changes to their existing algorithm,

according to yahoo blog

"We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index."

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Value of yahoo directory comment by webmasterworld member

The value of a Yahoo! Directory listing goes up as your site becomes more popular. On Yahoo.com, but not on its international counterparts, listings are sorted by popularity and, supposedly, relevance. In the past two months, I got 4 visitors from a listing halfway on page 3 of a category three levels deep. That's not too bad, especially considering that these are very targeted visitors with low bounce rates and an above-average number of pageviews per visitor. Admittedly, at 4 visitors every two months, or 24 per year, I am paying roughly $12.50 per click, and I am certainly not making that much per visitor to the site. Once Google Adsense statistics are included in Google Analytics, it will be interesting to see how valuable Yahoo! Directory traffic is for this particular site.

The site has been growing steadily for the past half year, and it will be equally interesting to see the shift in traffic when the listing moves up to the first page of the category. If you compare it to the traffic increase seen when you move up on a search engine results page for a particular query, a page one listing could be quite valuable, but that will, of course, depend largely on the popularity of the category.
A $300/month sponsor listing for the category would put me near the very top of the first page, which might be an interesting experiment if it weren't for all the scary reports of billing issues related to sponsor listings. Also, they would have to send me over 250 visitors per day for it to be directly worth the money, which does not seem very feasible.

All in all, it depends too much on the category and on your position within that category, so there is no one answer to the question of whether or not it is worth to be listed in the Yahoo! Directory. If you have the money, find the appropriate category for your site and try to analyze it thoroughly before submitting. How many other listings and other types of links (e.g. sponsored listings and category links) does it contain? How many levels deep is it from the directory homepage? How many clicks does it take to get from the Directory homepage to your category? Some categories are linked directly from the Directory homepage. Will this link give my site an edge over my competitors? Consider the fact that you can cancel your listing after a year if it turns out not to be worth the money. Also note that there may be some other benefits tied to a directory listing, like increased trust in the eyes of particular search engines, as mentioned before. Hard to track, but worth considering.

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Yahoo search engine update - Yahoo! Search Index Update

Yahoo recently made an update to their index and ranking algorithm. We did see a lot of movement for our sites and our client sites.

As per the official yahoo search blog:

"We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. "

www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000625.html

If you notice changes to your website please post in comments

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Ways to check backlinks in Google,Yahoo,MSN and other search engines.

I have many question me how to check the backlinks or links coming into their site in various search engines. Well i already wrote an article based on that here. https://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-strategies.htm this article isey a bit old but works great still. Today the top 3 search engines are more friendly to webmasters and are willing to share a percentage of what they know about your backlinks.

1. Google: Traditionally Google used to show most of the backlinks to a site ( link: ) but way back in 2002 they broke that comment and started showing backlinks only with PR 4 and above. Then later in 2005 they broke that too and started showing very less sometimes less than 2% of backlinks a site really possesses. This is had been the case for more than 2 years. But in 20o6 started a massive webmaster communication programme. They opened up something called Google sitemaps ( now called Google webmaster central ) . Later they capitalized on that and due to massive support they got from webmasters and now the webmaster tools shows a lot of data very useful for webmasters. One of that is the backlinks to a site/page/from inner pages etc. To check the backlinks what Google shows you need to first verify your website to prove you are the owner. Now we can check backlinks if we login to Google webmaster tools here.

Once logged in and site verified:
We go to Dashboard >> Links and we can check backlinks what Google shows.

Remember even this is not accurate here google shows atleast 25% backlinks so you can count that what they are showing is somewhat correct.

Yahoo: Yahoo is the only search engine who never hesitated to share their backlink data. In yahoo we can just use link:http:// to check for a single page or linkdomain: to check for an entire site. There are lot of ways you can check backlinks in yahoo especially filtering out sites. Please check those stuff here.

https://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-strategies.htm

MSN: MSN was showing backlink in link: command before a year but they broke the command and stopped showing all backlinks. `where you can verify your site like Google and check backlinks.

Its good to see search engines share more with webmasters in recent days i hope we see more from them in future.

vijay

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Yahoo Answers a threat to content publishers -

A webmaster world member complains about the domination of Yahoo answers. Yahoo answers a platform where users can ask questions and other experts in same field can answer the question. The person who asks the question has the option to decide which one is the relevant answer based on votes or by experience of the posting expert.

Today Yahoo answers is the NO.1 site for getting solutions from experts. We have forums for all topics but Yahoo answers have provided a clean solution to problems.

Sandy of webmasterworld asks

"Since last few months we had been observing this.. hopefully others can clarify more. We used to get decent results from yahoo search engine to some topics on our site but lately yahoo answers is ranking on top results for same phrases and keywords today.
No way to get on top ahead of yahoo answers now for those phrases "

Well as with any search engine the quality of the domain and the internal linking plays a important role in search engine rankings. Yahoo answers have an excellent internal linking and they are bound to dominate the results if the contents are unique. I feel that is what he is saying. There is nothing much he can do to fight against yahoo answers. One way he can try is to improve the content quality of his site and get more stronger links. Yahoo answers loose value over a period of time and i am sure his site will be on top once the power of the Yahoo answers topic fades off.

SEG

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Yaho search index and algorithm update



Yahoo recently updated their ranking algorithm. People in leading forums first noticing this change and now its live in Yahoo search. Yahoo previously announced that there will be constant updates happening to their algorithm and now it seems its happening.

Yahoo calls their update a weather report. They released a weather report about their search engine algorithm update recently.

According to yahoo search blog

"We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index, but expect the update will be completed soon.
Please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board to share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users. "

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PAVING WAY TO SEMANTIC SEARCH:

PAVING WAY TO SEMANTIC SEARCH:



This Blog is all about semantic search & its web standards & how it's helpful to Yahoo & its users. Yahoo is one of the biggest search engines. Semantic refers to searching large semantic web datasets, which is a typical problem for semantic web search engines & also refers to methods of searching web documents beyond the syntactic level of matching keywords. Semantic web is helping to shape the next generation of search transitioning from syntactical search to semantic search & yahoo search is supporting this technology. By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. Semantic search has attracted a lot of attention in the past year, largely due to the growth of the semantic web as a whole.

The term semantic search itself is popular enough to be considered overused. And, as an integral member of the Yahoo! SearchMonkey team, Peter refers to the benefits that SearchMonkey is experiencing with the semantic web and calls out the opportunities to integrate with both NLP and semantic web technologies. On the whole there are many benefits of semantic search and it's more effective than syntax based search.


ysearchblog.com - source:

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YAHOO ANOUNCES SETTLEMENT WITH CARL ICAHN

YAHOO ANOUNCES SETTLEMENT WITH CARL ICAHN

Yahoo who is a leading global Internet company announced that it has reached an agreement with Carl Icahn to settle their pending proxy contest related to the Company's 2008 annual meeting of stockholders. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, eight members of Yahoo's current Board of Directors will stand for re-election at the 2008 annual meeting.

In view of the settlement agreement with Mr. Icahn, and the termination of the proxy contest, Robert Kotick who is one of the board members has decided not to stand for re-election to the Board at the 2008 annual meeting & following 2008 annual meeting Yahoo board will be expanded to 11 members. Carl Icahn will be appointed to the Board. As part of the settlement agreement, Mr. Icahn, who owns an aggregate of 68,786,320 shares, or 4.98% of Yahoo common stock, has agreed to withdraw his nominees for consideration at the annual meeting and to vote his Yahoo shares in support of the Board's nominees. Yahoo chairman told that they are gratified to have reached this agreement, which serves the best interests of all Yahoo Stockholders. And they look forward to work productively with Carl and the new members of the Board in continuing to improve the Company's performance and enhancing stockholder value. Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang told that agreement will not only allow Yahoo to put the distraction of the proxy contest behind us, it will also allow the Company to continue pursuing its strategy of being the starting point for Internet users and a must buy for advertiser.

Icahn is very pleased that this settlement will allow him to work in partnership with Yahoo's Board and management team to help the Company achieve its full potential. He believes that this is a good outcome and he'll have a strong working relationship going forward. He is also happy that the board has agreed in the settlement agreement that any meaningful transaction, including the strategy in dealing with that transaction, will be fully discussed with the entire board before any final decision is made. On the whole both the parties are ready for this agreement & yahoo being a world-class company with an extremely bright future, and collaborating together, I believe, the Company achieves its ambitious goals.

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BOSS - Build your Own Search Service a step ahead from yahoo

Yahoo recently launched BOSS a new search service which helps to build your own search service.
A web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search. It is a new platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API. It also allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!'s production searchinfrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences.

SUMMARY:
* Ability to re-rank and blend results -- BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!'s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience.
* Total flexibility on presentation -- Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements.
* BOSS Mashup Framework -- We're releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
* Web, news and image search -- At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we'll be adding more verticals soon.
* Unlimited queries -- There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day.

USE FOR ITS PARTNERS & YAHOO:Its open up to infrastructure and technology to developers, entrepreneurs and companies because boss believes that being open is core to Yahoo!'s future success, opening their network, opening their own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening their search infrastructure via BOSS. It will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!. For BOSS, there's a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow their audiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo!Second, we do see new revenue streams from BOSS. In the coming months, BOSS will be launching a monetization platform that will enable Yahoo! to expand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search.

ADVANTAGE FOR ITS USERS: BOSS will enable a range of fundamentally different search experiences. These new search products will provide valueto users along multiple dimensions, such as vertical specialization, new relevance indicators and ranking models, and innovative UI implementations.

FEW EXAMPLES OF WHATS POSSIBLE WITH BOSS:ME.DIUM-Medium is a start-up that's built an innovative collaborative browsing product used BOSS to build a web-scale searchengine that leverages its real-time surfing data. By combining the depth of the Yahoo! Search index with its insight into where users are browsing, Medium can provide its users with a unique buzz-based search experience.

HAKIA-Its a semantic search start-up, which is using BOSS to access the Yahoo! Search index and dramatically increase the speed with which it can semantically analyze the web. With BOSS providing this important infrastructure, Hakia is ableto deliver a language search experience that isn't available from any of the "big three" search providers or other semantic search engines.

DAYLIFE TO-GO-Its a new self-service, hosted publishing platform from Daylife. Anyone can use this platform to generate customizable pages and widgets. It uses the BOSS API platform to power its web search module.

CLUUZ-This is a next-generation search engine prototype, generates easier-to-understand search results through semantic cluster graphs, image extraction and tag clouds. The Cluuz analysis is performed in real-time on results returned from the BOSS API.

To learn more about BOSS and get started using the API, visit the Yahoo! Developer Network. BOSS is open to all. One can check out the documentation, get a BOSS app ID and start building the next generation of search!!

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Yahoo rejects Microsoft icahn proposal -

Yahoo has agreed that its ready to take the previous Microsoft offer of 33$ per share to take over the whole company. It also denied a recent joined proposal by Microsoft and Mr.Icahn to take ever just yahoo's search engine Business.

Reason for denial

"1. Yahoo!'s existing business plus its recently signed commercial agreement with Google has superior financial value and less complexity and risk than the Microsoft/Icahn proposal.

2. The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would preclude a potential sale of all of Yahoo! for a full and fair price, including a control premium.

3. The major component of the overall value per share asserted by Microsoft/Icahn would be in Yahoo!'s remaining non-search businesses which would be overseen by Mr. Icahn's slate of directors, which has virtually no working knowledge of Yahoo!'s businesses.

4. The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would require the immediate replacement of the current Board and removal of the top management team at Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Board believes these moves would destabilize Yahoo! for the up to the one year it would take to gain regulatory approval for this deal."



Board Decision:

"Yahoo! Board's conclusion that the current proposal is not in the best interests of stockholders is based on a number of factors, including:

-- The revenue guarantees suggested, which are conditional and subject to reduction, are well below the search revenue that the Company is expected to generate on its own and in association with its announced commercial agreement with Google. That agreement alone is estimated to generate $250 to $450 million of incremental cash flow for the first twelve months following implementation, while allowing Yahoo! to remain a principal in paid search;

-- The success of the remaining Company is critically dependent on Microsoft's ability to effectively monetize search;

-- Microsoft/Icahn's proposed Traffic Acquisition Costs rates are below market;

-- The proposal calls for Yahoo! to sell its industry-leading algorithmic search business and its related strategic and valuable intellectual property portfolio for no incremental consideration; and

-- Many of the components of the headline value that Mr. Icahn and Microsoft put forward, such as the spin-off of the Yahoo!'s Asian assets and the return of cash to stockholders, are steps that could be taken by Yahoo! on its own and the Board continues to evaluate these options.



Mr. Bostock concluded, "Microsoft and Mr. Icahn are trying to dismantle the Company and deliver our search business to Microsoft on terms that would be disadvantageous to Yahoo! stockholders. We are prepared to let our stockholders, not Microsoft and Carl Icahn, decide what is in their best interests and we look forward to the upcoming vote.""

Search Engine Optimization Blog Team,



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Yahoo Search Index and ALgorithm Update July 2008



Yahoo Recently updated their Search index. As per their official announcement changes were made to the ranking, indexing and crawling issues. I have seen recent surge in Yahoo's crawling capabilities. Their Crawler Yahoo Slurp has been hitting hard on our sites and our client sites. Infact on some sites Yahoo has more indexed pages than Google. Also traffic from Yahoo has increased in double the numbers i am sure this is due to the change in their ranking algorithm. Lots of our inner pages rank in Yahoo now which looks like a very good indication of top rankings for many inner pages.

I hope yahoo doesn't mess with the current algorithm since it looks very much rewarding.

Official News here ysearchblog.com/archives/000596.html

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Chat with Semantic Web Expert Ben Adida by Yahoo,

RDFa launched!

Recently Yahoo chat had an interview with a web expert Ben adida. As Yahoo has announced its intentions to support semantic markups. Yahoo has continued to work with the best semantic markup community. Ben is a one among the faculty in Harvard Medical School and at the children's Hospital Informatics Program well as a research fellow with the Center for Research on Computation and Society with the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also the Creative Commons representative to the W3C and chair of the RDF-in-HTML task force, focusing on bridging the semantic and clickable webs.


Ben was questioned as to RDFa has been long in the process of making and the reply was that the delay was for a good because they wanted enough flexibility in the data management which would be useful for current as well as future use.

Y!: What can I do with RDFa?
BA: You can tell the world what various components on your web page mean by marking up things like:

* The title of a photo
* Your name and contact information
* The license under which you're distributing your latest MP3
* The ingredients of a cooking recipe
* The price of an item
* A gene on which you recently wrote a paper
* ... Anything that you want to make more machine-readable

With RDFa, you can reuse existing concepts, e.g. the title and price of an item, no matter what that item is. If there's a field you need that doesn't exist, you can create it.

This level of granularity encourages you to mark up your content as fully as possible, while letting applications consume only as much of the data as it needs.
Micro formats, eRDF and AB meta and RDFa all serve the same goal.
The advantage which RDFa provides compared to microformats, eRDF and AB meta are that while Micro formats do possess field conflicts RDFa doesn't have field conflicts the titles can reused. As concerned with eRDF has much lesser data content than RDFa.
To the critics Ben says that it is a matter of finding the right compromise and he considers that RDF and eRDF have the same level of complexities as far as authors are concerned. It is more difficult to write RDFa than microformats but that is because microformats are limited in scope and microformats are quite costly to use. For few months They are looking forward to assist the publisher's to produce RDFa tool and the tool builders to parse it correctly.


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MSN Live Search, Google Search and Yahoo Join Hands for a good reason

Google Yahoo MSN now have a common protocol for sitemaps and they also have same rules for understanding robots.txt file
As per live search blog,

"We at Live Search are pleased to announce another collaboration with Yahoo and Google aimed at making webmasters' lives easier. Webmasters have long used the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to control how search engines access and display their content. The REP offers an easy and efficient way to communicate with search engines, and is currently used by millions of publishers worldwide.
Over the past few years, we have been working with Yahoo and Google to agree on common ways for webmasters to communicate with search engines. Our previous efforts include support for the Sitemaps protocol .While most search engines already comply with the REP, this is the first time the three major search engines have come together to detail how we actually implement the protocol. This effort makes it easier for webmasters to know how REP directives will be handled by search providers.
You can view the details of how we implement the REP at Documentation for the Robots Exclusion Protocol."

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Google And Microsoft still fighting for yahoo

Microsoft Google Fight for Yahoo
Google has recently signed up a contract with Yahoo to serve Ads on Yahoo's Search Results. Though critics call this deal against ethics and will spoil the competition in Search Engine industry Yahoo is ready to go ahead with it.



On the other Hand Microsoft offered Yahoo A billion dollar Annually for Advertising in Yahoo's search results. According to a Reuters News Source



"Microsoft Corp offered Yahoo Inc $1 billion in cash to buy its search business in a deal that would have delivered $1 billion in additional annual operating income to Yahoo, a source familiar with Microsoft's thinking said on Friday.
In an alternative to a full acquisition, Microsoft would have taken control of Yahoo's search business, delivering the company better rates for advertisements tied to its search results than Yahoo's current Panama advertising system, the source said.
Microsoft would have also paid $8 billion to take a 16 percent stake in Yahoo, which would have valued the company's stock at $35 a share, the source said."

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Is Microsoft indirectly going for a Proxy fight?

BLB&G LLB group is taking on Yahoo on behalf of some share holders for not accepting Microsoft bid. this page has some very useful information that's just revealed.

On February 21, 2008, BLB&G, on behalf of Plaintiffs, filed a Class Action Complaint against Yahoo and its board of directors (the "Board"), alleging that they have acted to thwart a non-coercive takeover bid by Microsoft, which would provide a 62% premium over Yahoo's pre-offer share price, and have instead approved improper defensive measures and pursued third party deals that would be destructive to shareholder value. Yahoo's "Just Say No to Microsoft" approach is a result of resentment by the Board, and not any good faith focus on maximizing shareholder value. Microsoft attempted to initiate merger discussions in late 2006 and early 2007, but was rebuffed, supposedly so Yahoo's management could implement existing strategic plans. None of those initiatives improved Yahoo's performance. On February 1, 2008, over a year after its initial approach, Microsoft returned, offering to acquire Yahoo for $31 per share, representing a 62% premium above the $19.18 closing price of its stock on January 31, 2008.

Looks like the proxy fight is about to move forward more aggressively. Lets wait and see

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Yahoo index update May 2008 - Yahoo search engine algorithm and ranking update

Yahoo has made some changes to its algorithm and ranking factors. Yahoo calls its index update a weather update and Yahoo Weather updates are posted in the their Official blog by some Search Engineer.

"We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. "

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Hilarious image of yahoo's bragging on Petabyte database



Yahoo's bragging about their new improvement in database size of their petabyte database. Its a very cute image designed by our designer with great inside knowledge in SEO,



yahoo petabyte database

Yahoo's petabyte database cartoon



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Delicious IE extension a useful tool for IE / Delicious users

Internet explorer delicious users now have a new reason to smile. Del.icio.us has released a very neat extension for IE with some useful features.

IE features.
Near instantaneous searching with very large accounts (over 10K bookmarks)
Full del.icio.us sidebar and toolbar implementation with bookmark sync and typedown search
Toolbar indicators for new network activity and links for you
Works on IE6, IE7, and IE8 beta on both XP and Vista



From the day Yahoo acquired Del.icio.s this social bookmarking site has some sparkling features. Though i prefer Digg over delicious i feel delicious stands out better than Digg in features like this.

Way to Go,

SEG

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Yahoo's Petabyte index - Bigger is not always better

Yahoo breaches the petabyte mark. Yahoo's VP for data Mr.Wagan announced that yahoo has crossed the petabyte mark of the Search Index. Google in 2005 announced their data is 3 times more than Yahoo's but after that they went into silence and started discussing on search quality.



Now Yahoo has bragged again that they now have the capacity to store 10s of petabytes of data and is ready for the coming future.

For anyone who don't know what a Petabyte is it 1024 Terabytes and 1 terabyte is equal to 1024 gigabytes.

To tell in simple terms imagine you have an image on your website that is 50 KB then yahoo has data equivalent of 20,000,000,000 images that you have on your site. Or the current data cluster of Yahoo data equivalent of 20 billion 50 KB images.



Though yahoo claim to have a huge index i am sure Google will have much bigger index than Yahoo. I feel due to the competition between these two rivals soon we might expect an announcement from Google about their index capabilities.

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Yahoo Mcafee join hands to pick out spammers in search results



Yahoo has tied hands with Mcafee to pick spammers from search results and warn innocent searches from potential problem they might face visiting a website. If you see the following screen shot



You can see the warning display from Yahoo search results. The site featuring in search seem to be an email spammer. Emails submitted to that site are added to some bulk email lists and results in 1000s of spam to those email IDs. Now Yahoo includes a warning to remove these potential spammers. The note says "Use caution in providing your email address. It may result in unsolicited or spammy emails" The site featuring here is carbonneutral.com a potential email spammer according to Yahoo and Mcafee.

There will be some innocent occurrences of this where sites may get flagged for sending unsolicited email whereas the people who reported the email as spam had actually elected to receive it. But this is rare most of the time email spammers are spammers regardless of whether they are guilty or Not.

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Microsoft's Lost Love with Yahoo - A Contemporary version



We all know Microsoft has walked away from Yahoo's bid for 43 Billion dollars. Our Graphics team has beautifully portrayed on this recent issue. Enjoy the images.

microsoft yahoo a contemporary version

microsoft lost love

microsoft yahoo proposal

microsoft yahoo broken relationship
Kamesh is a dedicated graphics designer for Search Engine Genie and has completed lot of projects for us.


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Higher traffic from Yahoo after latest yahoo update.

We are experiencing quite a significant amount of increase in traffic from yahoo search engine after yahoo made an update before 10 days.

Yahoo Search Engine recently updated their algorithm and this made lot of sites shuffle in their rankings. Some sites lost rankings some gained we gained very good ranking for our site and now yahoo accounts for about 15% compared to Google. We probably got good boost in Yahoo Search Rankings. We used to get only 3 or 4% of traffic from Yahoo now it has increased significantly

We are happy that yahoo still have a good market share in search

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Yahoo Search Index rankings algorithm update

Yahoo recently updates their algorithm and search engine rankings. They made major changes as reported in their blog.

Update was reported on April 21st and it should be rolled out by now. We did notify some significant changes from our client sites as well as our sites so did you see it?

How was your site performance?

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Microsoft threatens to take on Yahoo if it doesn't meet its deadline


Microsoft has warned yahoo that it needs to keep up with the deadlines on Accepting the bid, Steve Balmer is an angry letter to Yahoo has said yahoo has 3 weeks to meet its deadline on accepting Microsoft's bid on 31$ per share which accounts to around 42 billion dollars. If yahoo doesn't meet the deadline Microsoft will take the matter to its investors.


Yahoo has responded strongly by ways of finding tie ups with AOL, Google inc, Myspace etc to increase its potential revenue. Also in intervening weeks Yahoo will be posting its earning potential for the next 3 weeks where it projects increase of 70% of its revenue. Yahoo is struggling all possible ways to increase the value of its company inturn increase the bid value of Microsoft,



As per current Market share in search yahoo gained 1 percent and currently has 21.6 % Market share. Google is steady with 59% and MSN while is only around 9%. Microsoft is keen to gain in Search market and they cannot just let go of yahoo for few Billions.



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