Yahoo's search and infrastructure expert Doug Cutting is leaving the company to join Cloudera. He will be leaving Yahoo! at the end of August, 2009. Cutting created the Hadoop technology for Yahoo's search index.
Although, people are assuming that the recent Yahoo-Microsoft deal, in which Microsoft would take over Yahoo's search engine can be the reason behind Cutting's move, he told the New York Times that is not the case.
Yahoo! has made a change to the Yahoo! Shortcut.Yahoo! Shortcut appears at the top of the Yahoo Search results page when users search for a local business. It basically shows things like how many reviews or ratings a business has. With the change, Yahoo! went on to include links to information users tend to take interest in, such as actual text of the reviews, photos and driving directions. The content is displayed right on the search results page.
After months of speculation, finally Yahoo and Microsoft search and online advertising deal is now official.
As per Yahoo’s Carol Bartz:
A few months ago, Yahoo! had revamped its Image Search preview. In addition, Yahoo! announced a refinement to its Image Search service – Travel Image Refiner. The new travel image refiner act as a virtual navigator that allows users to explore their popular points of interest by giving more contextual information about destinations.
Yahoo recently launched its new and improved homepage for web users. For months the forthcoming of Yahoo homepage had been known, but it was released yesterday around 4:30 Eastern.
Here’s the screenshot of the previous Yahoo homepage :
However, Yahoo will not replace the older homepage for now, rather an opt-in choice will be provided for interested users. Here's the new Yahoo homepage:
Yahoo! has announced the launch of its new note-taking research tool, named Search Pad. With the new feature, Yahoo! intends to help users organize their research on the Web! The feature was first announced in February this year.
Search Pad aims at providing users with a simple tool to remember and organize their specific searches, so that they can go back to the data whenever they want. This helps save users any research they have done and they do not need to do the same searches again.
The Yahoo! Search Blog recently announced an index and algorithm update, also called “weather report.â€
Dan Rampton from Yahoo! said, “We’re rolling out some updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the next few days. During this process, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.â€
Yahoo! recently announced that Yahoo! Web Analytics is now available for free to Yahoo advertisers supported by a Yahoo! account team.
Here's a screenshot of Yahoo! Web Analytic:
According to Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog:
“Yahoo! Web Analytics offers user insight that you’re not likely to find in other free analytics tools, including demographic and behavioral insight on your website visitors, near-real-time reporting, and visibility into as many as 50 different types of actions that take place on your site.â€
According to one of the NY Times reports, Yahoo! is planning to layoff some more of its employees for the third time sinche the first quarter of 2008.
In earlier posts we talked about 1000 Yahoo employees being laid off for the first time. However, about 1400 employees were removed again during the last quarter of 2008. It is believed that this will be the first major layoff since Yahoo!'s new CEO Carol Bartz took charge of the company.
Yahoo! continues to update its search index. Over the next few days it is expected to complete its updation on crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. However, during these modifications it is possible that users may find certain changes in their ranking and index page shuffling.
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