Yahoo was probably once the world’s most popular search engine on the Web but now, it seems that Google has been praised by millions of Internet users worldwide for its powerful and intelligent search engine, accurate results and useful services such as the secure Gmail, money-making programs like Adsense and Adwords and the famous Blogger platform.
Yahoo has recently introduce a new type of search advertising that integrates images and videos in paid listings, in a bid to catch up with the mighty Google. “It moves the advertising experience from just the blue links, to a more engaging experience for advertisers,” said Tim Mayer, the vice president for search monetization and distribution at Yahoo.
Unlike Google, it still retains its text-links ads on its search results pages as it wants to make it simple and neat. It has managed to attract many deep-pocket companies and bloggers to join the Adwords program. Hence, earning money from these advertisers makes Google more profitable than any other Internet companies out there.
Launched 5 years ago, Yahoo has reached some important milestones which includes the development of BOSS that helps them to open their search infrastructure and index to outside developers and the impressive Search Assist which helps Internet users to find exactly what they are looking for quickly and effortlessly. Besides these, the Yahoo team has launched a suite of mobile search products including Yahoo oneSearch. To boost its brand on the Web, it acquired both Flickr (a photo and video sharing platform) and Delicious (a social bookmarking tool) for $35 million and $10-$15 million (no formal acquisition price was disclosed but it has been speculated at between these prices).
According to Yahoo, they plan to continue to innovate in the years to come with the following highlights. One of their plans is to improve their search engine by continuing to open their search results page and infrastructure. Following in the footsteps of Google, Yahoo will be focusing on better and faster queries’ responses. To improve users’ search experience, they intend to develop a richer, more adaptive search results page.
The newly-launched Search Pad (currently only in testing and is not visible to all users) aims to make online research easier and it’s known that it’ll be available to the public soon. As I’ve mentioned earlier on, Yahoo announced on Thursday that the folks there will be showing search ads with images and videos. Besides that, they plan to deliver a new and better advertising experience that improves relevance for their users and ROI for their advertisers.
So what will Yahoo be like few years later? Well, let’s wait and see!