I’m not talking about them selling the company, (although there are rumors) I’m talking about their integrity and their overall credibility as a search engine, by appearing to sell the number one organic search result to the highest bidder.

Yesterday I attended the Internet strategy conference in Portland, and one of the speakers was Cammie Dunaway, the chief marketing officer for Yahoo.

During her presentation, she explained some new ways that Yahoo is working with advertisers, and she showed a TV commercial where the words “Special K” were typed into a Yahoo search box. When the search result page appeared, there was Kellogs, at the top of the search results, with a Special K logo right there by the SERP. Something about it looked odd to me, then it hit me… Directly above the advertisement, were the words “search Results” and the tinted box and the words “Sponsored Results” had been removed.

Apparently this campaign is still running.

Perhaps this is nothing new, and Yahoo has done it before, but I’ve personally never noticed it.

What bothers me about this, is that by removing the tinted box and leaving out the words “sponsored results“, Yahoo is effectively selling the number one search result. Is that option available for all advertisers? Is that option available for all phrases? Are they selling the number two, three, fours and five search results as well?

Cool, where do I sign up before my competition does, and how much does it cost? Yahoo does seem to be leaving the actual ranking numeral to the left of the organic result, does not make this any less confusing for the end user.

Yahoo, I think I would I would like my graphic for my “ad” to be a large red #1? Would that be all right? Clearly, it appears that Yahoo has gone out of their way to seamlessly blend an advertisement with their search results. Has anyone seen other instances of this?

Do you think we’re seeing the beginning of the end of organic search on Yahoo?

By: Scott - Source: pdxtc.com

Weather Report: Yahoo! Search update

We've been rolling out some changes to our fresh web data and crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed by the weekend. So, as you know, throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index : said Yahoo!

keeping coming the feedback : http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/webmaster/webmaster-01.html

Source: ysearchblog.com

There are now an estimated 137 million internet users in China, second in number only to the United States, where estimates of the current internet population range from 165 million to 210 million. The growth rate of China's internet user population has been outpacing that of the U.S., and China is projected to overtake the U.S. in the total number of users within a few years.

The influx of tens of millions of new online participants each year can be expected to have far-reaching consequences for the Chinese population, for China itself and for the larger world. At the very least, the internet will offer ever greater numbers of Chinese a much more sophisticated information and communications world than the one they currently inhabit. And because the Chinese share a single written language, despite the multiplicity of spoken tongues, it could have a unifying effect on the country's widely dispersed citizenry. An expanding internet population might also increase domestic tensions that could spill over into China's relations with the U.S. and other countries while the difference between Chinese and Western approaches to the internet could create additional sore points over human rights and problems with restrictions on non-Chinese companies.

Source: pewinternet.org

The news in brief: Yahoo is still treading water as Google zooms further ahead.

There shouldn’t be too many surprises when Yahoo reports financial results for the second quarter. If you didn’t hear about it, it may be because the company packaged the announcement that results would be on the lower end of their previous expectations along with much bigger news.

For those who missed it, here’s roughly what Yahoo said. First, Project Panama, a years long effort to close the gap with Google in search advertising, will begin paying dividends in the second quarter, sooner than previously expected. Second, display advertising — the banners and other graphical ads that appear on Yahoo pages and elsewhere on the Web — would be weaker than expected, wiping out any expected gains from Panama.

In light of that, analysts will be looking closely at two things. How much better is Panama than the previous system? That’s one area were Yahoo could get some much-needed good news. The other is whether Yahoo narrows downward the range of expected results for the remainder of the year. Some analysts are already counting on that. “It would surprise me a bit if they didn’t guide to the lower end of the revenue range for the rest of the year,” said Derek Brown, of Cantor Fitzgerald.
And of course, since Yahoo is under new management, the earnings announcement may well be a platform for company executives to announce what else they plan to do to revive the company’s fortunes.

On average, Wall Street analysts expect Yahoo to report net revenue of $1.24 billion and profits of 11 cents a share, or roughly flat when compared with $1.12 billion and 11 cents in the same quarter last year. Results are due out on Tuesday after the close of markets.
But Yahoo’s biggest challenge may well be the comparison with rival Google, which reports results on Thursday after the close of markets. Since the company reported stellar first-quarter results on April 19, shares have risen from just over $470 to more than $550. Expectations are for another blockbuster quarter, largely on the strength of Google’s core business, search and contextual advertising.

Wall Street is expecting revenues of $2.68 billion and profits of $3.59 a share, sharply up from $1.67 billion and $2.33 a share in the same quarter in 2006.

Here are some points that Mr. Brown, of Cantor Fitzgerald, made following Google’s first-quarter results: Roughly one third of online advertising worldwide flows through Google’s platform; as of the first quarter, year over year net revenue has grown by 65 percent or more for 21 consecutive quarters; Google’s net revenue is larger than Yahoo’s and eBay’s and gross revenue is larger than Amazon’s; despite that, Google is growing seven times faster than Yahoo and more than twice as fast as eBay and Amazon; and Google’s profit margins are bigger than those of Yahoo, eBay and Amazon. “It is bigger, growing substantially faster, with higher margins,” Mr. Brown said. “That’s a pretty compelling set of attributes."

Source: bits.blogs.nytimes.com

We are committed to an ongoing process to improve our privacy practices, and have recently taken a closer look at the question of cookie privacy. How long should a web site "remember" cookie information in its logs after a user's visit? And when should a cookie expire on your computer? Cookie privacy is both a server and a client issue.

On the server side, we recently announced that we will anonymize our search server logs — including IP addresses and cookie ID numbers — after 18 months.

Now, we're asking the question about cookie lifetime: when should a cookie expire on your computer? For background: a cookie is a very small file which gets stored on your computer All search engines and most websites use cookies. Why? Cookies remind us of your preferences from the last time you visited our site. For example, Google uses our so-called "PREF cookie" to remember our users’ basic preferences, such as the fact that a user wants search results in English, no more than 10 results on a given page, or a SafeSearch setting to filter out explicit sexual content. When we originally designed the PREF cookie, we set the expiration far into the future — in 2038, to be exact — because the primary purpose of the cookie was to preserve preferences, not to let them be forgotten. We were mindful of the fact that users can always go to their browsers to change their cookie management settings, e.g. to delete all cookies, delete specific cookies, or accept certain types of cookies (like first-party cookies) but reject others (like third-party cookies).

After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we've concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies — as long as we could find a way to do so without artificially forcing users to re-enter their basic preferences at arbitrary points in time. And this is why we’re announcing a new cookie policy.

In the coming months, Google will start issuing our users cookies that will be set to auto-expire after 2 years, while auto-renewing the cookies of active users during this time period. In other words, users who do not return to Google will have their cookies auto-expire after 2 years. Regular Google users will have their cookies auto-renew, so that their preferences are not lost. And, as always, all users will still be able to control their cookies at any time via their browsers.

Together, these steps — logs anonymization and cookie lifetime reduction — are part of our ongoing plan to continue innovating in the area of privacy to protect our users.

by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel - Source: The Official Google Blog